Fellows

Patrick Eickman, George L. Mosse Teaching Fellow (2026-2027)

Patrick Eickman's research currently centers on the sentimental practices and literature of the Teutonic Knights during the Middle Ages and frames his project using recent scholarship on the emotional turn and the Baltic Crusades. Eickman is particularly interested in how medieval ideas about emotions could essentialize Baltic peoples and how the Teutonic Order’s chroniclers constructed emotional communities that incorporated both monastic and chivalric ideas.

Alex Thomason, George L. Mosse LGBTQ+ History Fellow (2026)

Alex Thomason is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Interested in the histories of women, gender, and law in the early United States, his work examines the social and legal history of abortion and the politics of reproduction in the nineteenth century. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in History and Political Science with a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Tulsa.

Deep Acharya, George L. Mosse European Cultural History Fellow

Deep Acharya is a first-year PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Deep completed his M.A. in History at Miami University in 2025, where he wrote his thesis, From ‘Hug’ to ‘Heil’: The Masculinity Dilemma in Das Schwarze Korps of the Nazi Schutzstaffeln (1939–42)—a study of SS propaganda that unearthed surprising degrees of domestic sensitivity between bouts of ideological rigor. His doctoral research at Madison will trace the evolution of fatherhood across twentieth-century Germany—from the authoritarian structures of the Kaiserreich, through the ideological recalibrations of the Nazi regime, to the fractured paternal imaginaries of the postwar era. Moving beyond ideological typologies of the Nazi man, Deep intends to explore how fatherhood functioned as a contested site of socio-cultural negotiation, at the juncture of private life and state power. Originally from Bhadreswar, a small town near Kolkata, India, he remains committed to the historical analysis of masculinity, family, and authoritarianism—and to the slightly masochistic task of interpreting why even the most brutal regimes took parenting so seriously.

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.

Ludwig Decke, George L. Mosse Modern Jewish History Fellow

Ludwig is interested in the intersection of Jewish, (post-)colonial, and modern European history. His research investigates the paradoxes of liberalism as a force of both emancipation and domination. He is currently working on his dissertation project “Antiracism after Hitler: Jews, the State, and the Fight against Racial Discrimination in Western Europe, 1945-1992,” which intertwines two stories that are usually considered in separate terms: Jewish responses to antisemitism and the antiracist struggle of other racialized populations. Before he began his Ph.D. in the Midwest, Ludwig 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.

Christopher T. Lough, George L. Mosse European Cultural History Fellow

Christopher T. Lough is a doctoral student in History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he studies religious and intellectual history in transnational perspective. He specializes in modern France and its empire, with particular attention to colonialism in East and Southeast Asia. His dissertation will examine the role of Catholic missionaries and other religious actors in French Indochina, especially under Vietnam's shared Japanese-Vichyist occupation during the Second World War. Alongside a B.A. in History and French from Gettysburg College, he has also received support from the University of British Columbia through Fulbright Canada’s Globalink research exchange program. Christopher’s work can be found in Monumenta Nipponica, Christianity & Literature, and other publications.

Yuval Asher, HUJI MA student (2025-2027)

Graduate Exchange: 2026-2027

Yuval Asher is interested in the connections between modern revolutions, urbanization, and visual culture, with a particular focus on post-Revolutionary France and nineteenth-century Paris. Her M.A. thesis examines how the social and political transformations of the July Monarchy were reflected and contested within the urban environment through mediums of urban visual protest, including caricatures, posters, and especially graffiti. Her research analyzes graffiti as a form of interaction between city residents and governing authorities, emphasizing how unauthorized interventions in public spaces allowed citizens to protest by reclaiming and redefining the urban landscape. Through this lens, she seeks to illuminate the visual appropriation of urban spaces during modern urban revolutions, as well as the complex relationships embodied within them.

Uria Gilad-Taharlev, HUJI PhD student (2024-2028)

Graduate Exchange: 2026-2027

Uria Gilad-Taharlev is a Doctoral Candidate in the History Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Uria’s doctoral research will explore the relationship between playfulness and science in Western Europe from the 12th to the 14th centuries. His research interests focus on the cultural history of the Middle Ages, particularly on the various ways scientific knowledge took playful forms in board games, tales, rhymed poetry, and visual arts. Through analyzing these sources, he aims to shed light on how this construction of knowledge influenced thought and science during this period.

Gaya Nemet, HUJI MA student (2025-2027)

Graduate Exchange: 2026-2027

Gaya Nemet is interested in exploring the connection between the scientific attempt to "understand nature" and the visual culture of the modern era. Focusing on the environmental history of the Russian Empire during the reign of Tsar Nicholas II, her M.A. thesis will investigate how transformations in scientific fields like "natural history" influenced early environmental thought and how these changes are reflected in and influenced by modern landscape painting.

Yotam Ben Horin, HUJI PhD student (2022-2026)

Graduate Exchange: 2024-2025

Yotam Ben Horin is a PhD student at the Department of History and the Advanced School for Environmental Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He completed a BA in the History Honors Program and MA in History and Urban and Regional Planning. His primary areas of interest are climate history and historiography. His dissertation, under the supervision of Dr. Amit Tubi (Geography) and Dr. Lee Mordechai (History), concerns conceptual and methodological challenges embodied in the multidisciplinary research on historical climate-society interactions. Yotam is interested in knowledge formation and the influence of climate change science epistemologies on contemporary historical research. He focuses on the development of the Little Ice Age as a multidisciplinary conceptual framework, and on “lessons from the past” that scholars have drawn from different histories within that period.

Elitzur Gluck, HUJI MA student (2023-2025)

Graduate Exchange: 2024-2025

Elitzur is currently completing his B.A. in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is interested in the intellectual history of Germany and Austria in the 20th century, particularly from an anthropological-historical perspective. In his M.A. thesis, he intends to explore how political experience—both real and imaginary—shaped the way intellectuals and intellectual groups conceptualized the natural and human sciences in the German-speaking regions between the wars.

Tamar Shafran, HUJI PhD student (2026-2030)

Tamar Shafran is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is interested in the history of architecture and cultural exchange in the early modern Atlantic world. Her doctoral research examines the circulation of Mudéjar architectural forms from the Iberian Peninsula to colonial Spanish America and explores how these forms were reshaped and adapted in colonial cities such as Mexico City and Lima. By studying buildings alongside archival sources, she investigates how architecture reflected the social, political, and economic realities of colonial rule. Tamar holds a B.A. in Art History and in Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies, as well as an M.A. in Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies with a specialization in Digital Humanities, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Ohad Fine Azoulay, HUJI PhD student (2025-2029)

Graduate Exchange: 2027-2028

Ohad Fine Azoulay is a doctoral student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He holds a B.A. in Talmud and German Literature and an M.A. in Jewish History, both from the Hebrew University. His master’s dissertation, supervised by Professor Ofer Ashkenazi, explored the figure of the “New Woman” in rabbinic writings from the Weimar Republic.

Building on this foundation, his doctoral research investigates discussions of gender and sexuality in rabbinic responsa of the Weimar period. Treating responsa not merely as legal rulings but as cultural texts, his work examines the interplay between Jewish tradition and the broader intellectual and social transformations of interwar Germany. In addition to his academic work, Ohad translates German literature and philosophy, with publications including translations of Heinrich Heine and Georg Simmel.

Taili Hardiman, HUJI Mosse Coordinator

Graduate Exchange: Summer 2023

Taili Hardiman is currently completing her M.A. in History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and serves as the HUJI Mosse Program Coordinator.
She is interested in the intellectual and cultural histories of social science in nineteenth-century Britain as well as scientific metaphors in the construction of social theory. Her M.A. thesis, “Observing in Depth: Harriet Martineau’s Science of Society,” focuses on models of "depth" - geological and physiognomic - in Martineau’s thought and how these models can illuminate tensions within the historiography of social science.
She was the co-editor of "Hayo Haya: Student Journal for History" and an archival assistant for the "Einstein Papers Project."

Tsuriel Topper, HUJI MA student (2026-2029)

Tsuriel is currently completing his B.A. in History, Philosophy, and English Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Fueled by a deep curiosity about human motivations, his research interests are driven by a desire to deepen his understanding of the present through insights from the past. His M.A. thesis will focus on US foreign policy during the interwar period, seeking to examine the roots of the isolationist ideologies that prevailed at the time and explore the complex interplay between public opinion and political decision-making. By combining political history with social and cultural analyses, Tsuriel aims to delve into the public arena of the time and uncover how differing voices – from FDR to prominent public figures – competed for the public’s ear and shaped national identity. Alongside his research interests in History, Tsuriel is currently working on an article on the philosophy of grief.

Ofer Ashkenazi, George L. Mosse UW-Madison - Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty Exchange Fellow(2025-2026)

Ofer Ashkenazi is a Professor of History and the Director of the Koebner-Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He currently serves as the Vice Dean for Teaching Affairs in the Humanities. He is the author of four monographs that explore Jewish contribution to German “national culture” throughout the twentieth century. They include Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity (2012); Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape (2020); and (co-authored) Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany (2025).

Gonçalo Guerreiro Santos, Mosse-Friends of UW Libraries Fellow (2026-2027)

Gonçalo Guerreiro Santos is a PhD student in History at Faculdade de Letras (FLUL) - Universidade de Lisboa. He is a collaborator at Centro de Historia (CHUL) in the same university. He is currently writing a PhD thesis entitled “Para uma História Comparada da Ideologia Fascista no mundo Iberoamericano: os casos Ibéricos, Brasileiro e Argentino (1930-1945)/ Towards a Comparative History of Fascist Ideology in the Ibero-American World: the Iberian, Brazilian, and Argentine Cases (1930–1945).”
He has completed a BA in Political Science and International Relations at Faculdade de Ciências Sociais – Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCSH-UNL) and a MA in Modern and Contemporary History at Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE). His master’s thesis was titled: “História Comparada da Ideologia Fascista na Península Ibérica: os Casos dos Camisas Azuis e da Falange/FE de las JONS (1930- 1937)/ (Compared History of Fascist Ideology in the Iberian Peninsula: the Cases of the Blue Shirts and the Falange/FE de las JONS (1930-1937).”
He currently focuses on the writing and publishing of articles related with the topics of history of fascism, cultural history, nationalism and the extreme-right.

Lindsay Ehrisman, 2023-2026 George L. Mosse History Graduate Program Project Assistant

Lindsay Ehrisman is a PhD Candidate in African History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She specializes in the early histories of the Great Lakes Region of Central East Africa, with a focus on the topics of intimacy, affect, and well-being. Her dissertation, “Therapeutic Intimacy, Affective Medicine: Forging Bonds of Affection, Knowledge, and Power in Uganda’s Distant Past, 500-1900 CE,” centers around the first (West Nyanza) Bantu-speaking communities to settle along the western shores of Lake Victoria during the middle of the first millennium CE. Using comparative historical linguistic evidence, she traces the emergence of new forms of intimacy specifically designed to ensure the personal health and emotional well-being of ordinary actors during a period of profound political change and increasing socio-economic insecurity. She argues that the innovation of “therapeutic intimacy” not only improved the daily lives, opportunities, and well-being of ordinary individuals during this early period, but also went on to form the underlying logic of the region’s most powerful political and economic institutions in the centuries leading up to European colonial interventions.

Christopher Herde, 2026-2027 George L. Mosse Program Project Assistant

Christopher Herde is a PhD candidate in UW Madison's History Department researching cultures of play and competition around the medieval Mediterranean. His dissertation explores the role of equestrian sports in the construction of relationships and hierarchies among the Mamluk elite. He previously completed master's degrees in History and Medieval Studies from the Universities of Louisville and York respectively. In addition to the social and political importance of play in the Middle Ages, Chris is fascinated by the design and potential of modern games to engage, inform and shape our understanding of the medieval past. He will be combining both interests in the Spring of 2026 to help students explore the complex and evolving relationship between play and violence in the Middle Ages.

Rosa Fabian, George L. Mosse Program Researcher (2026-2027)

Rosa Fabian is a senior double majoring in History and Molecular and Cell Biology. Her interests include modern Eastern European and Central Asian history, medical history, and the history of nonviolent movements. She is looking forward to the opportunity to use archival materials to highlight veterans' stories and help the public engage with them. Outside of this fellowship, Rosa also tutors through Badger Volunteers and is working on an independent research project. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, reading, and playing board games.

Eliza Claire Stewart, George L. Mosse Program Researcher (2026-2027)

Eliza Stewart is a senior double majoring in History and Economics with a certificate in Public Policy. Her interests include modern European history, geopolitics, and ancient civilizations. On campus, Eliza is involved in Women in Economics. Through the George L. Mosse internship, she is excited to explore oral history as a means of preserving personal narratives and diverse perspectives. After graduation, she hopes to pursue a career in public service. Outside of classes and work, Eliza enjoys reading, traveling, and spending time outdoors.

Henri Stilling, George L. Mosse Program Researcher (2026-2027)

Henri Stilling is a Junior studying History and Political Science with certificates in German and Educational Policy. His historical interests include the Weimar Republic, medieval medicine, and LGBTQ+ history. He is excited to support the preservation of veterans' stories and believes in the importance of every voice being heard. Outside of the George L. Mosse Research Apprenticeship, Henri works as a UW-Madison tour guide, competes with the Model United Nations team, and is an editor with the Journal of Undergraduate International Studies.

Abby O'Callaghan, George L. Mosse Advising Fellow (2026-2027)

Abby O'Callaghan is a junior majoring in History with a certificate in political science. Her interests include North and South American Indigenous history, environmental history, and the Spanish language. In the future, she is interested in pursuing a graduate degree in history. Outside of classes and work, Abby likes to play ultimate frisbee, read, ride her mountain bike, hike, and play cards.