Research Fellows
2011-2012
Research Fellows
Jeffrey Lesser is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History at Emory University and Director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies. He's focusing on ethnicity, immigration and race, especially in Brazil. He's the author of numerous books and articles. While at The S. Daniel Abraham Center for International and Regional Studies, Prof. Lesser is researching the immigration to Brazil and Asian, Jewish and Arab diasporas in the Americas.
Dr. David Tal is the Kahanoff Chair in Israel Studies and a professor in the Department of History at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada since Summer 2009. He is also the Director of the Israel Studies program at University of Calgary. He is an expert in the diplomatic and military history of Israel as well as nuclear proliferation and disarmament. Professor Tal has published several books, including The American Nuclear Disarmament Dilemma, 1945-1963 (2008), War in Palestine, 1948: Strategy and Diplomacy (2004), The 1956 War: Collusion and Rivalry in the Middle East (2001- edited) and Israel's Conception of Current Security: Origins and Development 1949-1956 (1998). His articles have appeared in a variety of journals and at present he is working on a book on Israel Between Orient and Occident.
Dr. Alan Astro (Ph.D., Yale) is professor of French and Spanish at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He is the editor of Yiddish South of the Border: An Anthology of Yiddish Writing from Latin America (University of New Mexico Press, 2003) and Discourses of Jewish Identity in 20th- Century France (Yale French Studies 85: 1994). As a research fellow at The S. Daniel Abraham Center for International and Regional Studies, Prof. Astro will continue his research on Yiddish literature from Latin America and France, as well as literature on and by Jews in French and Spanish.
Dr. Amalia Ran is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Her research focuses on Jewish Latin American literature and culture, contemporary Argentinean fiction, literary criticism and cultural studies. She is the author of numerous articles. Her book Made of Shores: Rethinking Identities, Interpreting the Past? was accepted for publication at Lehigh University Press (2009). At present, she is preparing as a co-editor a special volume entitled Returning to Babel: Jewish Latin American Experiences and Representations to be published by Nebraska University Press. As a Research Fellow at the Abraham Center, Dr. Ran is working on a new book, Reconstructing Literary Cartographies in Argentina: Towards a Transnational Literature?, which explores how socio-economic, cultural, and linguistic transformations impact literary cartographies and reshape them.
Prof. Jan T. Gross, Princeton University, studies modern Europe, focusing on comparative politics, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, Soviet and East European politics, and the Holocaust. His first book, Polish Society under German Occupation, appeared in 1979. Revolution from Abroad (1988) analyzes how the Soviet regime was imposed in Poland and the Baltic states between 1939 and 1941. Neighbors (2001), reconstructs the events that took place in July 1941 in the small Polish town of Jedwabne, where virtually every one of the town's 1,600 Jewish residents was killed in a single day. Using eyewitness testimony Professor Gross demonstrates that the Jews of Jedwabne were murdered by their Polish neighbors "not by the German occupiers, as previously assumed". Professor Gross is also the author of several books in Polish, the coeditor of The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (2000), and the coeditor with Irena Grudzinska-Gross of War Through Children's Eyes
Junior Fellows:
As a junior fellow of the center Ori Rotlevy will work on his dissertation entitled "Orientation, Philosophy and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project". The project investigates the analogy between orientation in space and orientation in thought in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. This interdisciplinary dissertation combines historical analysis of Benjamin's account of modern urban experience with the analysis of the form of his thought on a philosophical background including Kant and Heidegger. This method allows answering questions regarding the effect of modern urban experience on thought, and regarding the revolutionary potential "urbanized" thought might have.
Guy Lurie is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of History, Georgetown University. At the Curiel Institute, Guy Lurie will work on his dissertation entitled "Citizenship in Later Medieval France." The project investigates the interconnections between political thought, political society and the practice of citizenship in the law and politics of France from c. 1380 to c. 1480. The dissertation illustrates how political thought was put into practice in the specific context of citizenship.
Roni Ratzkovsky has recently submitted her dissertation entitled "City, Alter-City: German Intellectuals writing on Paris, 1900-1933". The dissertation examines the German image of Paris during the first third of the 20th century, in the context of the German discourse regarding the phenomenon of the modern city in general, and Berlin in particular. The study revolves around a comparison between the images of Berlin and Paris, as manifested in the writings of contemporary intellectuals for whom these two cities were a fundamental frame of reference. As a junior fellow at the center she is writing a few articles on topics related to the subject of the dissertation
2010-2011
Research Fellows
Jeffrey Lesser is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History at Emory University and Director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies. He's focusing on ethnicity, immigration and race, especially in Brazil. He's the author of numerous books and articles. While at The S. Daniel Abraham Center for International and Regional Studies, Prof. Lesser is researching the immigration to Brazil and Asian, Jewish and Arab diasporas in the Americas.
Dr. Amalia Ran is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Her research focuses on Jewish Latin American literature and culture, contemporary Argentinean fiction, literary criticism and cultural studies.She is the author of numerous articles. Her book Made of Shores: Rethinking Identities, Interpreting the Past? was accepted for publication at Lehigh University Press (2009). At present, she is preparing as a co-editor a special volume entitled Returning to Babel: Jewish Latin American Experiences and Representations to be published by Nebraska University Press. As a Research Fellow at the Abraham Center, Dr. Ran is working on a new book, Reconstructing Literary Cartographies in Argentina: Towards a Transnational Literature?, which explores how socio-economic, cultural, and linguistic transformations impact literary cartographies and reshape them.
Dr. Hillel Eyal
Hillel Eyal is a Fellow at Tel Aviv University working in the field of Latin American history. He received his PhD in history from UCLA in September 2006. His research examines the social history of Spanish immigration in colonial Mexico, focusing on the growing conflict between European Spaniards and Mexican-born Creoles towards the end of the colonial period. His broader historical interests are Atlantic history and comparative colonialism in the early modern world. His thematic interests include social and economic history, historical demography and quantitative methods. As a Research Fellow, he is pursuing a comparative project on transatlantic immigration and Spanish identity throughout colonial Spanish America.
Junior Fellows:
As a junior fellow of the center Ori Rotlevy will work on his dissertation entitled "Orientation, Philosophy and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project". The project investigates the analogy between orientation in space and orientation in thought in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. This interdisciplinary dissertation combines historical analysis of Benjamin's account of modern urban experience with the analysis of the form of his thought on a philosophical background including Kant and Heidegger. This method allows answering questions regarding the effect of modern urban experience on thought, and regarding the revolutionary potential "urbanized" thought might have.
2009-2010
Fellows:
Porf. Shail Mayaram has explored subaltern perspectives on state and sovereignty, mobilities and identities in relation to peasant, pastoral and Âoetribal" peoples. As a theorist of violence she has worked on inter-ethnic relations in Asian cities including dimensions of conflict, coexistence and conviviality. Her intellectual engagement has also been in the larger field of religion and politics, the question of conversion, transnational religious movements and political theologies with implications for democracy and secularism. Her current interests are in writing a history of cosmopolitanism and in the project of swaraj in ideas and its implications for decolonizing knowledge.
Publications include Against History, Against State: Counterperspectives from the Margins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); coauthored with Ashis Nandy, Shikha Trivedi, Achyut Yagnik, Creating a Nationality: The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and the Fear of Self (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); coedited with Ajay Skaria and MSS Pandian, Subaltern Studies: Muslims, Dalits and the fabrications of history vol 12 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005); edited, The Other Global City (New York and London: Routledge, 2009) and Philosophy as Samvada and Svaraja: Dialogical Meditations on Daya Krishna and Ramchandra Gandhi (Shimla and Delhi: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, forthcoming). A current book project is titled, Nationalism in the time of Imperial Terror: From the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana.
Dr. Martin J. Wein Born in Frankfurt am Main in 1973, I grew up in West Germany and spent several years in the Czech Republic and the United States, where I received an M.A. in Jewish studies from Emory University. I settled in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel in 2001 and received a doctorate in Jewish history from Ben Gurion University in 2007. My academic interests include Jewish history and Christian-Jewish relations in the Bohemian Lands, Czechoslovakia and Central Europe in the early modern and modern period, Antisemitism and the Holocaust, as well as Jewish-defined languages, religious aspects of linguistics, theory of nationalism and historical theory. My academic homepage is located at www.mjwein.net.
Dr. Amalia Ran is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Her research focuses on Jewish Latin American literature and culture, contemporary Argentinean fiction, literary criticism and cultural studies.She is the author of numerous articles. Her book Made of Shores: Rethinking Identities, Interpreting the Past? was accepted for publication at Lehigh University Press (2009). At present, she is preparing as a co-editor a special volume entitled Returning to Babel: Jewish Latin American Experiences and Representations to be published by Nebraska University Press. As a Research Fellow at the Abraham Center, Dr. Ran is working on a new book, Reconstructing Literary Cartographies in Argentina: Towards a Transnational Literature?, which explores how socio-economic, cultural, and linguistic transformations impact literary cartographies and reshape them.
Dr. Wright taught for several years at the University of Heidelberg before coming to Candler, where he offers courses on biblical interpretation, the history and archaeology of ancient Israel, and Northwest Semitic languages. He is the author of a number of articles on Ezra-Nehemiah as well as Rebuilding Identity: The Nehemiah Memoir and Its Earliest Readers, which won a 2008 Templeton prize (the largest prize for first books in religion). In addition to responsibilities in the excavations at Ramat Rachel (located outside Jerusalem), he is currently writing articles and a book that examine the role war and the military played in ancient Israelite society.
Junior Fellows:
Lior Ben David is a PhD Candidate at the Sverdlin Institute for Latin American History and Culture, The School of History, Tel Aviv University. His PhD dissertation, entitled Indians and Indigenistas in the Field of Criminal Law: The Cases of Mexico and Peru, 1910s-1960s, scrutinizes the image, representation and treatment of the Indians and of the ?Indian question? in the criminal justice system of each of these countries during the said period, employing a comparative stance and a combination of different perspectives - historical, legal and criminological. It is conducted under the supervision of Dr. Gerardo Leibner and Prof. Assaf Likhovski.
Daniel G. Kressel is a PhD student of contemporary European History in the History graduate program at Tel Aviv University. His focuses on the European post-war memory politics, especially those involving the symbolic mechanisms which have established and acknowledged victim status. His MA thesis proposed new insights into the historical polemic regarding the nature of the alleged Spanish *pact of oblivion*, by pointing to the self-victimized narration assumed by the publicist elite in Madrid during the Spanish transition from dictatorship to democracy.
Daniel Lis
Daniel Lis is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Jewish Studies, University of Basel, Switzerland. His historical and anthropological research focuses on processes of Judaization, especially on the Igbo ethnic group from Southeastern Nigeria. He's the author of several articles in English and German, director of an ethnographic documentary film and Vize-President of the International Society for the Study of African Jewry (ISSAJ). While at Tel Aviv University, Daniel Lis is co-teaching a course on African migrations and identities together with Dr. Galia Sabar, as well as conducting research for the conclusion of his dissertation.
David Mano
Mano is a Ph.D. student at Tel Aviv University. He graduated from Venice University (Ca' Foscari) in 2000. His research at the School of Historical Studies focuses on judicial sources from the Tuscan village of Pitigliano and proposes a micro-analysis of the relations between Jews and Christians during the Italian revolutionary age (end of the 18th century). Mr. Mano is the author of several articles on Jewish subjects and a translator from Hebrew literature. He is currently writing his dissertation.
As a junior fellow of the center Ori Rotlevy will work on his dissertation entitled "Orientation, Philosophy and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project". The project investigates the analogy between orientation in space and orientation in thought in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. This interdisciplinary dissertation combines historical analysis of Benjamin's account of modern urban experience with the analysis of the form of his thought on a philosophical background including Kant and Heidegger. This method allows answering questions regarding the effect of modern urban experience on thought, and regarding the revolutionary potential "urbanized" thought might have.
Hagar Spiro
2008-2009
Carlos Waisman received his Ph.D. from Harvard. His field is comparative political sociology. He has worked on the incorporation of the working class in the political system in different countries, the causes of diverse elite strategies toward labor, the development of Argentina, the consolidation of new democracies, and the transitions to open-market capitalism in the Southern Cone of Latin America and Central/Eastern Europe. He has published Modernization and the Working Class: The Politics of Legitimacy (University of Texas Press, 1982), Reversal of Development in Argentina: Postwar Counterrevolutionary Policies and their Political Consequences (Princeton University Press, 1987), winner of the Hubert Herring Award for the best book of the year in Latin American studies), From Military Rule to Liberal Democracy in Argentina (Westview Press, 1987), and Institutional Design in New Democracies: Eastern Europe and Latin America (Westview Press, 1996).
Dr. Hillel Eyal
Hillel Eyal is a Dan David Fellow at Tel Aviv University working in the field of Latin American history. He received his PhD in history from UCLA in September 2006. His research examines the social history of Spanish immigration in colonial Mexico, focusing on the growing conflict between European Spaniards and Mexican-born Creoles towards the end of the colonial period. His broader historical interests are Atlantic history and comparative colonialism in the early modern world. His thematic interests include social and economic history, historical demography and quantitative methods. As a Research Fellow, he is pursuing a comparative project on transatlantic immigration and Spanish identity throughout colonial Spanish America.
Doctoral candidate in social sciences for the Universidad de Buenos Aires (Scholarship of the CONICET -National Commission of Technical and Scientific Researching). Magister (Mg) in cultural diversity for the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF). His first academic degree was in Political Science. Researcher in the Center of Genocide Studies (UNTREF-Argentina) and in the History of the Ideas area (Universidad de Belgrano-Argentina) Co-editor of the Revista de Estudios sobre Genocidio and author of La modernidad atravesada. Teología Política y Mesianismo (Miño y Dávila Editores, Buenos Aires, 2008) and Otredad, orientalismo e identidad (Teseo, Buenos Aires, 2008).
Prof. Nicholas Terpstra
Professor Terpstra is a specialist in the social history of Renaissance and early modern Italy. He has published extensively on urban society, charitable institutions, and confraternities. His books include Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance: Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna (Johns Hopkins: 2005) and Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge University Press: 1995), which was awarded the Howard R. Marraro Prize of the Society for Italian Historical Studies. He has edited three collections, The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy (forthcoming), The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: 2000) and Civic Self-Fashioning in Renaissance Bologna (special issue of Renaissance Studies vol. 13/4 [1999]), and co-edited three others: Sociability & Its Discontents: Social Capital & Civil Society in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe with N. Eckstein (Brepols: 2008), The Renaissance in the Streets, Schools, and Studies with K. Eisenbichler (Toronto: 2008), The Renaissance in the 19th Century with Y. Portebois (Toronto: 2003). He is currently working on a set of projects having to do with the politics and economics of charity. Prof. Terpestra will be attached to the Curiel center from the end of March to mid-May, 2009.
Junior Fellows
Elena Baibikov
Elena Baibikov submitted her Ph.D. at The Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies of Kyoto University. Elena specializes in social and cultural aspects of translation, mostly focusing on the literary translation from Russian and Hebrew into Japanese. As an M.A. and Ph.D. student, she was awarded with five years MEXT scholarship, provided by Japanese government. While at The Shirley and Leslie Porter School of Cultural Studies, Elena is researching on the translator?s activity as entrepreneurs of culture in the wider context of cultural diffusion, using the case of Japanese translators of Israeli-Hebrew literature. Additional emphasis in her research is put on translator?s professional self-fashioning.
Aya Elyada is a graduate student for German-Jewish History at The Graduate School of Historical Studies, Tel Aviv University. She is writing her dissertation, ?Early Modern Christian Literature on Yiddish in the German-Speaking World?, under the supervision of Prof. Shulamit Volkov (Tel Aviv University) and Prof. Michael Brenner (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich). Aya has published several papers in Hebrew, English, and German, and participated in numerous conferences and workshops in Israel, Germany, England, and the USA.
Chen Kertcher is a Ph.D. student at the School of History, Tel Aviv University. Currently he is at the final stages of writing his dissertation titled: The UN and Peacekeeping in Cambodia, Former Yugoslavia and Somalia, 1988-1995. His MA thesis won an award and was published in Gitelson Peace Publications in 2003. His field of experties are military and diplomatic history in the modern age, the United Nations its role in the international system and especially its use of peacekeeping operations from the cold war to our times, World and Global Histories. He has a rich teaching experience in various topics on military and diplomatic history and the Middle East. He also served as the head of Academic Division in Avni Institute, the College for Art and Design Tel-Aviv.
As a junior fellow of the center Ori Rotlevy will work on his dissertation entitled ?Orientation, Philosophy and Walter Benjamin?s Arcades Project?. The project investigates the analogy between orientation in space and orientation in thought in Walter Benjamin?s Arcades Project. This interdisciplinary dissertation combines historical analysis of Benjamin?s account of modern urban experience with the analysis of the form of his thought on a philosophical background including Kant and Heidegger. This method allows answering questions regarding the effect of modern urban experience on thought, and regarding the revolutionary potential ?urbanized? thought might have.
Hagar Spiro
Doctoral candidate in social sciences for the Universidad de Buenos Aires (Scholarship of the CONICET -National Commission of Technical and Scientific Researching). Magister (Mg) in cultural diversity for the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF). His first academic degree was in Political Science. Researcher in the Center of Genocide Studies (UNTREF-Argentina) and in the History of the Ideas area (Universidad de Belgrano-Argentina) Co-editor of the Revista de Estudios sobre Genocidio and author of La modernidad atravesada. Teología Política y Mesianismo (Miño y Dávila Editores, Buenos Aires, 2008) and Otredad, orientalismo e identidad (Teseo, Buenos Aires, 2008).
2007-2008
KC Johnson is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. His research focuses on the intersection of politics and policy, especially involving the U.S. Congress and international affairs. He's the author of five books and numerous articles. While at Tel Aviv University, Prof. Johnson is teaching courses on the United States and the Middle East, 20th century U.S. foreign relations, and 20th century American politics, as well as continuing his research for a book on Cold War U.S. foreign policy.
Dr. Hillel Eyal
Silvina Schammah Gesser submitted her Ph.D. at The Graduate School of Historical Studies, at Tel Aviv University. She specializes in Spanish cultural history of the 20th century, with emphasis on the political discourse of the artistic vanguards prior to the Spanish Civil War. She has published on these topics and has been awarded various research grants such as the Fulbright fellowship, the Spanish grant for Hispanistas and the Hebrew University Ginsberg fellowship. While at The S. Daniel Abraham Center for International and Regional Studies, she is researching on the interrelations among collective memory during Spain?s transition to democracy, the role of culture and the arts in the internationalization of post-Francoist Spain and various forms of institutional commemorations of the Spanish Civil War.
2006-2007
Prof. Jeffrey Lesser
Dr. Claudia Kedar
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