Fellows

Donatello Aramini, Mosse-Friends of UW Libraries Fellow (2020-2022)

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.

Isobel Ashby, George L. Mosse LGBTQ+ History Fellow

Isobel Ashby is a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison majoring in American History and minoring in Gender and Women's Studies. Before moving to Madison from the UK, she was awarded an MPhil in American History from the University of Cambridge and a BA in History from the University of Bristol. She is currently developing her research on Black women's involvement in the pro-life movement, particularly the espousal of the "abortion as Black genocide" narrative, in the late-twentieth century United States.

Boaz Berger, HUJI PhD student 2018-2022

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.

Isabelle Cook, George L. Mosse Peer Advisor

Isabelle Cook is a senior at UW-Madison majoring in History, Russian, and Economics. She is currently writing a senior honors thesis under the guidance of Professor Ratner-Rosenhagen on early Keynesianism in America. Isabelle’s love of history has been inspired by her time living in Berlin, Germany and her travels to Eastern Europe and Russia, where her interests in WWII and the Holocaust were piqued. She is proud to be a part of the Mosse Program serving as a Peer Advisor because this role marries two of her greatest passions: promoting the study of history among her own generation and honoring the legacies of the victims of the Holocaust.

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, HUJI Mosse Program 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 Fellow 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.

Mor Geller, HUJI PhD student 2022-2026

Mor Geller is currently finishing her MA in History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) and will begin her PhD in autumn 2021. Her dissertation will explore the widespread phenomenon of public opinion polling in East Germany and the multiple roles it played in the effort to sustain and reform the state’s power structure between the mid-1960s and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Through an analysis of the surveys and reports produced by the state-sanctioned social research institutes, she aims to establish the centrality and of this method to the cultural, social, and political history of the German Democratic Republic and to understand the ways in which it was used by citizens in unexpected ways to imagine the future(s) of the GDR.
Mor’s research interests include film, Alltagsgeschichte, and Marxist thought. She has won fellowships and grants from HUJI’s Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History, and the DAAD at the HUJI European Forum. She has also served as co-editor of graduate and undergraduate journal of history Hayo Haya in the years 2019–21.

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.

Jen Gramer, George L. Mosse Graduate Program Project Assistant

Jen Gramer is the Grad Program PA in the Dept. of History as well as a Ph.D. candidate in modern European history. As a PA, she trains new TAs, helps coordinate professional development workshops, works with staff to recruit new graduate students, and serves as a liaison between staff, students, and faculty. As a Ph.D. candidate, she focuses on modern Germany, particularly memory and material/visual culture. Her dissertation, “’Monuments of German Baseness’: The Legacy of Nazi-Era Artwork Post-1945” examines the reception history of paintings created under the Third Reich in Germany and the U.S. and how this history has shaped the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“coming to terms with the past”).

Matthew M. Greene, 2021-2022 George L. Mosse Project Assistant

Matthew M. Greene is a PhD candidate in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work explores the structured and deliberate undoing and renegotiation of language by German-speaking and German-writing individuals, including migrants and immigrants, members of the LGBT+ community, and ethnic and cultural minorities such as Jews, Roma, and Sorbians. In May 2020, his first Yiddish-English translation appeared in the journal In Geveb in collaboration with Chad S.A. Gibbs. At UW-Madison, he teaches a variety of German language as well as Yiddish history, culture, and literature courses. He holds an MA from UW-Madison in German, an MA from Dartmouth College in Comparative Literature, and a BA from the University of Vermont in European Studies, the German language, and the Italian language.

Jack Halverson, George L. Mosse Peer Advisor

Jack Halverson is in his fourth year at UW-Madison, majoring in History and Political Science with a certificate in Public Policy. His academic interests include the history of religious education in America, progressive politics in the United States and Europe, as well as Environmental Conservation. During his time at UW, Jack has served in a leadership capacity for Badger Volunteers teams throughout the Madison community and he is very excited to serve as a Mosse Peer Advisor in order to advance the importance of the study of history.

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’.

Amit Levy, George L. Mosse Dissertator Fellowship (2021-2022)

Amit Levy is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he also completed his MA studies. As a cultural and intellectual historian, he is interested in the ways migrating knowledge affects transnational and inter-cultural encounters, especially in imperial and colonial contexts. In his PhD project, entitled A New Orient: German-Jewish Oriental Studies in Palestine/Israel, 1926–1963, Amit studies the migration of Orientalist knowledge from German universities to Palestine/Israel and the encounter of Arabic and Islamic Studies scholars with the Orient. He is also developing a new project which will explore encounters of migrating and local knowledge in British Mandate Jerusalem, starting with the British-Arab-Jewish initiative of the Palestine Folk Museum (1936-1948). Since 2019 Amit also serves as the managing editor of Naharaim: Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History.

Abigail Lewis, George L. Mosse Dissertator Fellowship (2021-2022)

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.

Maddy McGlone, George L. Mosse Program Undergraduate Intern (2021-2023)

Maddy McGlone is a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin-Madison majoring in History and Environmental Studies with a certificate in Folklore. Her interests include Wisconsin history, material culture studies, and oral history as a way to observe the impact of larger historical events. Outside of her work in history, she heads the UW-Madison fellowship of Matriculate, a college-access non-profit that trains college students to advise low-income high school students. Additionally, she is interested in sustainable agriculture and will be studying abroad in Bhutan in the spring of 2022 to research the country’s commitment to equitable development. She is currently working on research looking at the term ‘Coastie’ and its relation to the Jewish community at UW-Madison. She is excited to expand on different aspects of her prior experience as an undergraduate intern with the George L. Mosse Program.

Noy Nahum, HUJI MA student (2022-2024)

Noy Nahum is currently completing his B.A in History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His main interests are in intellectual history and political ideas in the second half of the 20th century, particularly in Michel Foucault’s Political Philosophy. He also researching Michel Foucault's process of entrance into the Israeli discourse, and the contemporary Israeli discourse about Foucault's philosophy. In his M.A. thesis he looked at how Foucault understood the relationship between his works and the ideas of neo-Marxist thinkers of his time. Noy is the 2022-2023 George L. Mosse Fellow to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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 (2020-2022)

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.

Ri J. Turner, George L. Mosse Modern Jewish History Fellow

Ri J. Turner is a PhD candidate in the department of History. Her research focuses on the role of the American Yiddish press as a semi-private space for "internal" conversation among Eastern European Jewish immigrants at the turn of the last century. She holds an MA in Yiddish from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and an MA in Jewish Studies from Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts, as well as a BA in Anthropology from Cornell University. Apart from research, she is passionate about Yiddish language pedagogy, the curation and translation of little-known Yiddish texts, setting Yiddish poetry to music, and reading literary and journalistic texts in Hebrew, Polish, French, and Spanish.

Nina Walter, George L. Mosse European Cultural History Fellow

Nina Walter has come to UW-Madison from Scotland, where she completed her studies in History and Cultural Identity at the University of St Andrews. For her Masters thesis, Nina conducted original archival research into the role of Esperanto in Poland ca. 1887-1939. During her time in Wisconsin, she would like to further explore attitudes to multiculturalism and multilingualism in pre-World War II Europe through the prism of Esperanto, with a special focus on Jewish communities in Poland and Celtic (and possibly Scots) speakers on the British Isles.
Historical research into the early stages of the Esperanto movement in Europe perfectly combines Nina’s interests in culture, history, and languages. She holds a Qualified Teacher Status from the University of Warsaw and has spent most of her adult life traveling extensively and teaching English in Poland, Britain, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.