To help ensure that serious study and research of the Holocaust continues even after survivors are gone, the Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellowships program has provided academic fellowships to Ph.D. students since 2008. Each academic year, seven new fellowships are granted and these newly admitted students comprise a Cohort. In 2013, the program expanded to include funding for Post-doctoral candidates as well. Both Ph.D. and Post-doc Kagan Fellows may apply for a renewal of funding, but only for a second consecutive year. Kagan Fellows come from, and are studying in, numerous countries, and utilize archives around the world.
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Istvan Pal Adam
Istvan Pal Adam holds a PhD in history from the University of Bristol, where his work was supervised by Tim Cole and Josie McLellan. Prior to that, he completed his MA at the Central European University, History and Jewish Studies Program. During his studies, Adam was awarded numerous fellowships. He was a Tziporah Wiesel Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust ...Read moreMarie-Dominique Asselin
PhD candidate, University of Ottawa Marie-Dominique Asselin’s PhD project aims to look at the fate of the Polish Jews at the time of the Holocaust, as seen through the prism of court records. The research will seek answers to the various questions related to everyday Jewish life and death in the ghettos, as well as to the nature of relationships between the ...Read moreLaura Auketayeva
Laura Auketayeva (she/her) is currently Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at American University, Washington, D.C. She received her B.A. in International Relations and History from Boston University, as well as an M.A. in History from the State University of New York, Albany. Her dissertation focuses on the European Jewish refugees in the Soviet Union during the Holocaust. By incorporating ...Read moreAleksandra Bańkowska
Aleksandra Bańkowska’s dissertation will be a monograph on the work of the whole social welfare system for the Jews in German-occupied Warsaw undertaken since the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 until the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. Due to directives issued by the German administration in occupied Poland, the majority of the Jewish population was ...Read moreNatali Beige
Natali Beige, PhD candidate, Tel Aviv University Natali Beige’s PhD dissertation studies Šiauliai region in Lithuania, during World War II and the Holocaust, highlight Jewish life in the provincial towns, and expose the various German and local Lithuanian forces that took part in the implementation of the Final Solution in the region. Although an extensive historiography of the Holocaust in Lithuania exists, ...Read moreNoah Benninga
Noah Benninga, Ph.D. Noah Benninga received his Ph.D. from Hebrew University for his 2016 dissertation, the “Material Culture of Prisoners in Auschwitz” (advisor: Moshe Zimmermann). Adapting the theoretical work of Joel Fineman (“The Anecdote” and “New Historicism”) to witness narratives and testimonies, this project identifies objects and practices employed by prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau that constituted everyday life in the camp. Benninga’s ...Read moreWaitman W. Beorn Ph.D.
Dr. Waitman Wade Beorn is currently the Louis and Frances Blumkin Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and assistant professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. He teaches courses in German history, European history, the Holocaust, comparative genocide, and historical methodology. Dr. Beorn received his PhD in History from the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill in 2011 where he ...Read moreAlina Bothe
Alina Bothe, Ph.D. Alina Bothe received her M.A. in History, Political Sciences and East and Southeast European History from Freie Universität Berlin, where she also received her Ph.D. in History. She was a Research Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg, and has taught diverse classes at the Freie Universität Berlin, the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, as well as IES ...Read moreRobin Buller
Robin Buller, Ph.D. Candidate Robin Buller’s dissertation examines the history of Sephardi Jewish immigrants in Paris during the interwar period and the Holocaust. Hailing from the recently dismantled Ottoman Empire, this population numbered upwards of twenty-thousand individuals at the outbreak of the Second World War. Ms. Buller is particularly interested in connecting Jewish history and Holocaust studies by asking how the cultural and ...Read moreRebecca Carter-Chand
Rebecca Carter-Chand is a Ph.D Candidate in the Department of History and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. Her advisor is Doris Bergen. Her dissertation is entitled, “Doing Good in Bad Times: The Quakers, Salvation Army and Seventh-Day Adventists in Nazi Germany.” The study uses government records, the groups’ internal records and sources from Jews with whom ...Read morePaula Chan
Paula Chan’s dissertation examines the Extraordinary State Commission created by Stalin’s government to gather evidence of Nazi crimes during World War II. These investigations generated an enormous amount of material – more than 43,000 files – that remained off-limits even to Soviet researchers until after the collapse of the USSR. In the years since, the release of these documents has fueled the massive expansion of ...Read moreStephanie Corazza
Stephanie Corazza’s dissertation examines child welfare workers who rescued Jewish children during the Holocaust in France. She follows these workers as they navigated different sites of relief and rescue, including French internment camps, children’s homes run by charities, and foster family homes and institutions that sheltered children under social worker surveillance. This work was rarely stationary and movement became a key ...Read moreCaroline Cormier
Caroline Cormier’s dissertation examines the large-scale disruption to Jewish homes that took place in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. Specifically, her research explores the displacement of Jews from their private residences and their forced relocation into Nazi-designated ‘Jew Houses’, or Judenhäuser, in three of Germany’s major cities: Berlin, Dresden, and Hamburg. Beyond providing the wartime histories of these often ...Read moreKierra Crago-Schneider
Cohort II Kierra Crago-Schneider PhD studied the day-to-day interactions among Jewish survivors (mainly those living in Displaced Persons centers), Germans, and American soldiers in postwar Munich, specifically through their involvement with the postwar German economy. Dr. Crago-Schneider has been interested in Shoah studies since she was a little girl and learned that her grandmother’s family fled from the Nazis. However, her interest in ...Read moreAlison B. Curry
Alison B. Curry is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At UNC, Curry is working with Dr. Karen Auerbach. Previously, she received her M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Gratz College, advised by Dr. Michael Steinlauf, and a Graduate Certificate in Digital Public Humanities from George Mason University. Curry’s dissertation, tentatively titled ...Read moreIonela Ana Dăsculțu
Ionela Ana Dăsculțu received her MA in Jewish Culture and Civilization from the University of Bucharest and her BA in History from the “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu (Romania). Ionela is currently a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Haifa, Israel. She is completing a dissertation entitled “Jewish Children in Orphanages in Transnistria (1942-1944). History and Memory”, under ...Read moreElla Florsheim
Ella Florsheim PhD studied the revival of Yiddish culture in the Displaced Persons camps in Germany after World War II and especially the broad-ranging Yiddish press published in the camps. She is interested in the different expressions of this revival, such as literary and journalistic writing and theatrical activity, and in particular its connection to the private and communal rehabilitation of ...Read moreTalia Farkash
Talia Farkash’s doctoral thesis, supervised by Prof. Sara Bender, studies the history of the Jews of the town Tarnow, located in the Krakow district in Poland, during World War II and the Holocaust, 1939-1944. The research aims to examine the response of Tarnow’s Jewish population to the various stages of the German occupation, from its beginnings to the extermination of the ...Read moreLauren Fedewa
Lauren Fedewa is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. Lauren’s research interests include the Holocaust, Genocide, modern Jewish history, and European history. She is currently working on her dissertation tentatively titled “‘Always One Step Away from Death, and Always Afraid’: Jewish Women who ‘Passed’ ...Read moreTomasz Frydel
Tomasz Frydel examines what has been called by historians as the “third phase” of the Holocaust, namely the attempt by the Germans to destroy the remaining Polish Jews to survive Operation Reinhard in the General Government. These desperate fugitives fled ghettos and jumped off trains headed for death camps as they sought shelter among peasants in rural areas from 1942-45. ...Read moreSimon Goldberg
Simon Goldberg’s dissertation, supervised by Prof. Debórah Dwork, investigates the production of knowledge about the Kovno (Kaunas) ghetto in Lithuania. Records created by members of the Jewish council and Jewish police have long dominated scholarly and popular imagination about Kovno. Yet their influential status yielded an unbalanced portrait of Jewish life under German occupation. To shed new light on these ...Read moreSofija Grandakovska
Dr. Sofija Grandakovska holds a doctorate degree in Comparative Literature, obtained from the Department of Comparative Literature, Faculty of Philology “Blaze Koneski”, SS Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Macedonia, and actively engages in the fields of Cultural, Jewish and Holocaust Studies. In 2014 she was recognized as Associate Professor and from 2009-2013 she held a position of Assistant Professor in ...Read moreEmanuel Marius Grec
Emanuel Marius Grec is a PhD Candidate in history at Heidelberg University, Germany. He is currently working on his dissertation titled “The Perpetrators of the Odessa Massacre: War-Crimes Trials in Postwar Romania (1944-1948)”, under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Tanja Penter. In the thesis, he examines the ways in which perpetrators and war criminals were portrayed in Romanian war crimes ...Read moreKatarzyna Grzybowska
Katarzyna Grzybowska is a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, a member of the Research Center for Memory Cultures and the Curatorial Collective. Since 2018 she has participated in the Global Education Outreach Program Doctoral Seminars (2018-2021). Grzybowska received her M.A. in Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University. She is conducting a research ...Read moreNikolaus Hagen
Nikolaus Hagen received his PhD in history from the University of Innsbruck in 2018. He has been the recipient of a joint postdoctoral fellowship of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies and Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Prior he was a European Holocaust Research Infrastructure Fellow at Arolsen Archives and a Fellow of the Jewish Museum Munich. ...Read moreMelanie Hembera
Melanie Hembera received an MA in Medieval and Modern History and Political Science at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. She successfully defended her PhD thesis, “The Shoah in the District of Cracow in the General Government; The City of Tarnów as a Case Study” in December 2014. Melanie Hembera is a researcher at the Forschungstelle Ludwigsburg of the University of ...Read moreAlexis Herr
Alexis Herr received her BA from Claremont McKenna College. She received her doctorate in Holocaust History from the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University. Ms. Herr has held teaching positions at Keene State College and Northeastern University. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards including the Saul Kagan Claims Conference Dissertation Fellowship (2012-2014); and the ...Read moreIsaac Hershkowitz
Cohort I Mr. Hershkowitz writes, “My main area of research, rabbinic theological and sociological responses to the Shoah, has been reviewed (by Greenberg, Schindler, Polen, Farbstein, etc.), yet I feel it has not been appreciated enough by theological and moral researchers of the Shoah. Rarely can one find a rabbinic outlook cited as a legitimate moral source or reference in dealing ...Read moreAlicja Jarkowska-Natkaniec
Alicja Jarkowska-Natkaniec, Ph.D. Alicja Jarkowska-Natkaniec, Ph.D., graduated from the Jagiellonian University with a degree in Jewish Studies. She has participated in several scientific grants in Poland concerning the field of Jewish Studies and Holocaust Studies. She has also taken part in a dozen well-attended scientific conferences and has published many scientific articles related to Holocaust Studies. Jarkowska-Natkaniec is also a co-author of two ...Read moreKamil Kijek
Kamil Kijek, Ph.D., graduated from the University of Wroclaw, with a degree in Sociology and Jewish Studies. He has been a Prins Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York and Sosland Family Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. During his doctoral studies he held ...Read moreOlga Kartashova
Olga Kartashova is a Ph.D. candidate in Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. She is currently writing her dissertation, “International Networks and Jewish Efforts to Prosecute Nazi Criminals in Poland (1944-1959)” under the supervision of Professor David Engel. Olga specializes in the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, its aftermath, memory, historiography, and trials. She holds M.A. degrees ...Read moreAnne-Christin Klotz
Anne-Christin Klotz, Ph.D. Candidate Anne’s dissertation examines individual and collective reactions of Polish-Jewish journalists who wrote for the Yiddish daily press in Warsaw about the events in Nazi Germany from the moment of Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933 up to the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the following months. The history of the Yiddish press during the 1930’s, ...Read moreJonathan Lanz
Jonathan Lanz is a doctoral candidate at Indiana University Bloomington in the United States. His dissertation is entitled “The Ghetto Next to the Gas Chamber: Social Networks and Daily Life in the Theresienstadt Family Camp.” Given the relative lack of archival documentation surrounding Jewish society in Birkenau, Jonathan’s research seeks to probe how analyzing the postwar testimony of Family Camp ...Read moreLovro Kralj
Lovro Kralj’s dissertation “Paving the Road to Death: Antisemitism in the Ustasha Movement 1929-1945,” reinterprets the importance of antisemitism in the Croatian fascist Ustasha movement. Given the fact that the Ustasha ideological core was initially not antisemitic, questions as to why and how they adopted antisemitism has not been adequately answered. Kralj challenges historiographical interpretations which reduce the Ustasha antisemitism to mere imitation of Nazism and ...Read moreAliza Luft
Aliza Luft’s research focuses on the decision-making processes underlying individuals’ behaviors in high-risk contexts, particularly in genocides as they decide whether to support or resist violent state regimes. Luft’s dissertation, Defecting from the Episcopate, examines the process by which French bishops during the Holocaust in France deviated from their support for the Vichy to help save Jews, despite the high personal and institutional costs ...Read moreDanijel Matijevic
Danijel Matijevic is a doctoral candidate in History and Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, focusing on modern East-Central European history and history of mass violence and genocide under the mentorship of Dr. Doris L. Bergen and Dr. Piotr Wróbel. Matijevic’s dissertation aims at a social history of mass violence in Southeastern Europe during the Second World War and ...Read moreEugenia Mihalcea
Eugenia Mihalcea is a Ph.D. candidate in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa, Israel. In her doctoral dissertation (supervised by Prof. Stefan Ihrig), The Holocaust in Transnistria: its (hi)story and post-war memory, she examines how Transnistria was created as the space for the implementation of the Holocaust and how it was (re)created during the post-war period in Romania and ...Read moreMarkus Nesselrodt
Ph.D. candidate, Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg and Free University Berlin Markus Nesselrodt’s dissertation examines individual experiences of Polish Jews who survived Nazi persecution during World War II by flight or deportation to the interior of the Soviet Union. The history of more than 230,000 Polish Jews in wartime exile in the Soviet Union has received relatively little scholarly attention so ...Read moreDenisa Nešťáková
Denisa Nešťáková, Ph.D., graduated from the Comenius University in Bratislava, with a degree in General History. Her dissertation was dedicated to Arab-Jewish relations during British Mandate for Palestine through the perspective of the German Temple Society. Denisa Nešťáková’s current project Privileged to be in Hell. Jewish Women in the Sereď Camp aims to reconstruct the history of Sereď camp, one of ...Read moreAmber Nickell
Amber N. Nickell is a Ph.D. Candidate at Purdue University. Writing under the guidance of Dr. Rebekah Klein-Pejsova, she is currently authoring a dissertation titled, “Brotherlands to Bloodlands: Ethnic Germans and Jews in Southern Ukraine, from the Late Imperial to the Postwar.” In it, she traces relationships between ethnic Germans and Jews in the region over the long durée, as ...Read morePaula Oppermann
The object of Paula Oppermann’s PhD research is the Latvian Fascist Party Pērkonkrusts (Thunder Cross). The project investigates the history of the organisation from origins in the 1930s, when Pērkonkrusts leaders developed their antisemitic agenda, fostered the dehumanisation of Latvia’s Jewish citizens and thereby the disintegration of the whole society. It then illuminates the role of Pērkonkrusts during World War ...Read moreAline Pennewaard
Aline received her BA from Leiden University in the Netherlands and is currently a graduate student in the Holocaust Studies program at Haifa University. Her thesis is about the transports from the Netherlands to the concentration camps in 1942 and 1943: what can be learned from the deportation lists regarding the prior logistical planning of these deportations? She also looks ...Read moreMihai Poliec
Mihai Poliec is a PhD Candidate in Holocaust History at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. In his doctoral dissertation, Civil Society’s Complicity during the Holocaust in Romania, he examines the participation of civilians in anti-Jewish violence in Bessarabia and Bukovina between July 1941 and August 1944. Poliec earned a Bachelor’s in Psychology and a Master’s in Judaic Studies from the University of Bucharest. He ...Read moreElisabeth Pönisch
Elisabeth Pönisch, PhD Candidate, Institute of Sociology, University of Freiburg, Germany In her interdisciplinary study, Elisabeth Pönisch examines the enforced “relocation” to and life in the so-called “Jews’ houses”, which were established in the course of the “Law on Tenancies with Jews” in 1939. The residents experienced the life in the “Jews’ Houses” as a human crisis resulting from the destabilization ...Read moreIon Popa
Dr. Ion Popa successfully defended his PhD thesis in December 2013 at the University of Manchester, UK, where he also received his M.A. in Religion and Political Life in 2009. Before starting his Saul Kagan Claims Conference Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dr. Popa was a DRS Postdoctoral Fellow at Freie Universität, Berlin (2015-2016) and a part-time lecturer in Holocaust Studies at the University ...Read moreIrina Rebrova
Irina Rebrova is originally from the South of Russia and is studying at the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism, Technical University Berlin. In her Ph.D. project, she studies early evidence of the Holocaust and the memory politics about it in the North Caucasus, South Russia. This region is not typically part of Holocaust history, but it was very important as a ...Read moreChiara Renzo
Ph. D Candidate, History, Universities of Florence and Siena (Italy) Chiara Renzo’s dissertation focuses on Jewish displacement in Italy after War World II. Her research aims at tracing the history of non-Italian Jewish displaced persons (DPs) who, between 1943 and 1951, found a temporary refuge in Italy. Ms. Renzo is investigating the life conditions of Jewish DPs in refugee camps, as well as the relief and ...Read moreMonika Rice
Monika Rice, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University and Gratz College where she teaches a gamut of courses on the Holocaust, Jewish-Christian relations, and women’s spirituality. She has been a recipient of a number of prestigious fellowships and grants, among them: the Claims Conference Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies, Albert Abramson Fellowship in Holocaust Studies, the Hadassah-Brandeis ...Read moreRichards Plavnieks
Cohort II Richards Plavnieks is a Ph.D Candidate in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He completed his dissertation, titled “Wall of blood: The Baltic German case study in National Socialist wartime population policy, 1939-1945,” under the supervision of Professor Christopher Browning. Using German-, Russian-, English-, and Latvian-language sources, Richards has undertaken a case-study ...Read moreMeghan Riley
Ms. Riley is studying Modern European History and her dissertation is on Aid Organizations in French Concentration and Internment Camps.Read moreGrzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe
Dr. Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe investigates the Polish collaboration with the Germans during the Second World War. In contrast to the Polish resistance and the German occupation of Poland, the subject of the German-Polish collaboration has not yet been investigated in depth. As a result, the knowledge about this complex and important subject is still fragmented, and a comprehensive understanding of the entire ...Read moreNa’ama Shik Ph.D.
Na’ama studies the Jewish female experience in Auschwitz-Birkenau. In addition to her native Hebrew, she has full mastery of English, and plans to study Yiddish improve her German. She has published several articles concerning her primary research focus, the mother-daughter relationships in the camp, and on the corpus of early testimonies from Auschwitz and about sexual abuse there. Her dissertation ...Read moreJoanna Sliwa
Joanna Sliwa’s research examines daily life and inter-ethnic relations in extremis. Specifically, Ms. Sliwa’s dissertation focuses on the Holocaust in Krakow, Poland from the perspective of Jewish children’s experiences. She approaches the topic from multiple angles – the German authorities, Jewish community, gentile neighbors, the Jewish family, and the youth themselves – thus widening the view of Eastern European Jewish life ...Read moreAllison Somogyi
Allison Somogyi received a B.A. in History at Grinnell College in 2009 and an M.A. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her dissertation chronicles the history of everyday life of the Jewish community in Budapest under Nazi occupation, with a focus on widespread, small-scale resistance efforts.Read moreEric C. Steinhart
Cohort I Eric’s dissertation, tentatively titled “Creating Killers: The Nazification of the Black Sea Germans, 1941-1944,” probes the relationship between SS Volksdeutsche policy and the prominent role of Soviet ethnic Germans in the Holocaust in southern Ukraine. In addition to his native English, he is fluent in German and has a command of Russian and French. Eric was born in Glenview, Illinois ...Read moreSylwia Szymanska-Smolkin
Claims Conference Fellows come from, and are studying in, numerous countries. Sylwia Szymanska-Smolkin, originally from Poland, is one of the scholars whose research is partially funded by the Claims Conference. Sylwia is studying the Polish Police and their dealings with the Jewish population during WWII, but growing up in Jozefow, Poland, she was not really aware that there had been a ...Read moreJason Tingler
PhD Candidate, Clark University Jason Tingler explores the Holocaust and interethnic relations in the Chełm region of Poland. Chełm, the mythical “town of fools,” is arguably the most popular place in Yiddish folklore, but Chełm was a genuine locality whose actual Jewish population bore no resemblance to the comical depiction of the “wise men.” Jews in this region had long lived ...Read moreFielder Valone
Fielder Valone earned a dual bachelor’s degree in History and American Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 2011. He is the author of “Destroying the Ties that Bind: Rituals of Humiliation and the Holocaust in Provincial Lithuania” (2012), which received the American Historical Association’s Raymond J. Cunningham Prize for the best undergraduate-written article published in a history ...Read moreLaurien Vastenhout
PhD Candidate in History at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. Laurien Vastenhout has eared an MA Degree in Holocaust and Genocide studies (2014) and an MPhil in History (2015), both at the University of Amsterdam. Recently, she co-lectured a Comparative Genocide Studies MA course at the same University (2017). Her dissertation examines the functioning of the Jewish Councils of the Netherlands, ...Read moreStacy Veeder
Stacy Veeder, PhD Candidate- History and Genocide Studies, University of New York at Albany Stacy Veeder’s dissertation project, The Republican Race: Assimilation, Persecution and Race in France, 1933-1945, focuses on ideas of integration and assimilation within French national life during the interwar period and the Second World War as those ideas underwent radical reconstructions. Crucial to this project is an analysis of ...Read moreAgnieszka Witkowska-Krych
Agnieszka Witkowska-Krych, Ph.D., is a cultural anthropologist, Hebraist, and sociologist. She graduated from the University of Warsaw with a degree in Inter-faculty Individual Studies in the Humanities, and gained another degree from the Collegium Civitas, Warsaw. Her Ph.D. dissertation (defended in January 2021 at the University of Warsaw) is devoted to the fate of the orphaned children in the Warsaw ...Read moreKim Wünschmann Ph.D.
“Jewish history, the Shoah and Germany’s Nazi past are fields of interest that have accompanied me for most of my conscious life. Already as a young teenager, I read the diary of Anne Frank, Imre Kertesz’ Fateless, Primo Levi’s works, Art Spiegelman’s Maus comic and other important works of Shoah literature which have profoundly influenced me. After my high school ...Read more