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.

Donatello Aramini, Mosse-Friends of UW Libraries Fellow (2020-2021)

Donatello Aramini has a PhD in Contemporary History. He is a lecturer in Contemporary History at the Department of Political Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome. He has taught History of contemporary Italy and the history of journalism at the Roma Tre University and University of Cassino, and was a 2011 Mosse-Friends Fellow. He is a member of the editorial board of Mondo contemporaneo. His research examines nationalism, Nazism, racism and the history of historiography. He is the author of the book George L. Mosse, l'Italia e gli storici (FrancoAngeli, Milan, 2010) and is currently working on two monographs on nationalism and fascism and on the myth of Rome in fascist Italy.

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.

Boaz Berger, Mosse 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.

Collin Bernard, George L. Mosse European Cultural History Fellow

Collin Bernard is a doctoral student in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his MSc from the London School of Economics from the International History department in 2017 and his B.A. from the University of Western Ontario in Canada. His research is focused on the political, intellectual, and social history of post-1945 Western Europe with a focus on Italian and Urban History. His MSc thesis was an exploration into the relationship between the Italian Communist Party and the 1968 student and worker movements within the context of a global intellectual history of Marxist thought. His current research investigates how urban change beginning in the 1970s across Western Europe transformed left-wing thought and parties.

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.

Ludwig Decke, George L. Mosse European Cultural History Fellow

In autumn 2020, Ludwig Decke will begin his Ph.D. in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He studied history, philosophy, and sociology at the University of Leipzig, the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was a Fulbright Fellow at UW-Madison in 2018-2019. Fascinated by how ideas have shaped politics and societies in Western Europe and the US, his research interests include transnational right-wing movements, antisemitism and nationalist thought, the rise and fall of liberal internationalism, and modern Jewish politics. In his M.A. thesis, Ludwig examines a group of non-Zionist Jewish scholars in the United States who responded to the Nazis by embracing American liberalism and envisioned a global order based on liberal democracy as the prerequisite for a Jewish postwar future.

Tom Eshed, HUJI PhD student 2020-2024

Tom Eshed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He completed an MA in Jewish History in 2020 and his BA in History in 2017 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His MA explored the cooperation between the Israeli Foreign Ministry and Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Authority, during the 1950s. His dissertation will expand this research to consider the intersection between Israeli diplomacy and Holocaust Memory during the Cold War. He is particularly interested in the influence of cultural diplomacy on transnational memory and the impact foreign relations have on national narratives.

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 and his BA in history at the University of Wyoming. His dissertation project, “Against that Darkness: Perseverance, Resistance, and Revolt at Treblinka,” adds to our understanding of life inside this camp by exploring inmate relationships—or social networks—and how prisoners leveraged these bonds to gain some measure of control over lethally restricted camp geography. Maintaining emphases on networks and space throughout, Chad’s work further delivers analysis of gender and masculinity in life and resistance at the camp while working to recover the long-overlooked experiences of women at Treblinka. In the 2020-2021 academic year, Chad will hold fellowships at the USC Shoah Foundation and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Taili Hardiman, HUJI MA student (2020-2022)

Taili Hardiman is currently completing her B.A in History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her main interests are in the histories of science and visual culture in modern Europe. Continuing onto an M.A in History, she will focus on the production of knowledge, observational practices, and disciplinary development of the social sciences in 19th Britain. Taili is the 2020-2021 George L. Mosse Fellow to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently the co-editor of ‘Hayo Haya - Student Journal for History’ and an archive assistant for the ‘Einstein Papers Project’.

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 Ph.D candidate in European History at UW-Madison. She completed her M.A. in History at UW-Madison in 2014 and her B.A. in history from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2012. Her dissertation, entitled, “The Collaborationist Eye: The History and Memory of Photography during the Occupation of France” reveals the stories of photographers living and working under Nazi and Vichy rule during the Second World War. Her work also offers an innovative material history of these photographs and maps the uses of these photographs as propaganda, press photos, legal evidence, historical resources, and pedagogical objects. This work demonstrates how photographs have shaped and re-shaped understandings of the occupation years. For this work, Abigail has received numerous research and writing fellowships including the Chateaubriand Dissertation Fellowship, the Bourse Jeanne Marandon, the Mellon-Wisconsin Writing Fellowship, the JB and Maurice C. Shapiro Fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and most recently, the George L. Mosse Exchange Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. In 2018, she taught a course as the George L. Mosse Teaching Fellow called “Picturing History: Visual Culture and Memory in Modern Europe” on the history of images and photography in modern Europe.

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.

Samson Olanrewaju, Exchange Fellow (2020-2022)

Samson Olanrewaju is a PhD candidate in the Department of Classical and Ancient Near Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on the literary growth of ancient Israelite historiography, the Pentateuch, and the Hebrew Bible within the general context of the Ancient Near Eastern world. He is especially interested in the Deuteronomistic History and David’s place in the development of ancient Israelite royal ideologies in the Hebrew Bible. In his dissertation, he provides a source- and redaction- critical analysis of the literary growth of the Davidic oracle in 2 Samuel 7:1–17 and its interaction with other passages in the books of Kings.

Stefania Ragaù, Mosse-Friends of UW Libraries Fellow (2020-2021)

Stefania Ragaù earned her PhD in contemporary history at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa with a work on the flowering of the Jewish utopian novels in relation to the emergence of Zionism. In her challenging studies on Jewish utopias, she deals with the secularization of Jewish thought between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, analyzing the influence of a modern messianism through which Jewish nationalism configured itself as a secular religion. These projects led Ragaù to Mosse's works. She is currently developing her studies along two further lines of research, which is related to the encounter between the European philosophy of history and Jewish thought: one line is the Jewish utopian imagination beyond Zionism, while the other is the historical reconstruction of the Nationalhumanismus, a concept which seems to have been created by Max Brod and Felix Weltsch in the so-called “enge Prager Kreis”. Finally, she is currently drafting her first monograph on the Jewish utopian novels before Theodor Herzl's Altneuland (1902).

Emma Soderholm, George L. Mosse Program Undergraduate Intern (2020-2022)

Emma Soderholm is a sophomore currently working towards her B.A. in History and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Planning on studying in Berlin, Germany during the fall of 2020, Emma is interested in the development of Human Rights during the Cold War. She enjoys discussions on the role of international organizations in fostering both cooperation and contention during the Cold War. Emma is particularly interested in hearing the stories of individuals whose lives have been impacted by events in history, and she looks forward to working as the Undergraduate Intern in the George L. Mosse Program.

James Ungureanu, George L. Mosse Historian in Residence

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.