Mollie Ables is a doctoral student in musicology. Her areas of research include sacred music in late-Renaissance Venice and Jewish musical ethnography in the early twentieth century.
Ayesha Athar is a doctoral student in History researching the Jews of Morocco in the 20th century. She completed her undergraduate degree in Jewish Studies and History at IU.
Gabrielle A. Berlinger is a doctoral student in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. Her dissertation focuses on multi-cultural, multi-ethnic neighborhood in Tel Aviv-Yafo, with particular focus on Sukkot holiday observance.
Jessica Carr, a doctoral student in Religious Studies, is researching her dissertation “The Practice of Palestine: Images of the Holy Land in Jewish American Public Culture in the Early 20th Century,” with support from the College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship. She has taught “Introduction to Judaism,” “American Judaism and Popular Culture,” and “Jews, Christians, and Muslims”.
Dan Clasby, is a History doctoral candidate, completing his dissertation on Italian Jews and the Holocaust. He has been a visiting assistant professor at Middlebury College.
Erin Corber, hailing from Montreal with an undergraduate degree from McGill University and an M.A. in history from University of Toronto, is a fourth year Ph.D. student in the Department of History. Last year in France, she researched the effects of the First World War on French and Algerian Jewish communities in the interwar period.
Dara Hill completed her master’s degree in Philosophy at Purdue University before pursuing her Ph.D. in Religious Studies at IU. She has presented research on religious self-consciousness and obligation at a conference on Levinas.
Mitsuko Kawabata is a second year Ph.D. student in Ethnomusicology. Her research interest is music and the hybrid identity of Latin American Jews. Her article, “Between Tradition and Creativity: Why Do Jewban Musicians Perform Their Identity?” (originally written in Japanese) was published in the report Crossing Arts and Media under the Japanese governmental Global COE (Centers of Excellence) program.
Barbara Krawcowicz is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies writing a dissertation on covenantal theodicy among Haredi and modern Jewish thinkers during and after the Holocaust. Before coming to IU, Barbara studied at Warsaw University, Poland, where she received M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy.
Elizabeth Lambert has spent the last years in Germany with support from a Fulbright Fellowship and funding from the DAAD and the Holocaust Education Fund researching and writing her dissertation, “Contested Memory: Divided Representations of Weimarer Klassik and KZ Buchenwald”. Kiev. In spring 2012, she will be a doctoral fellow in residence at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.
Devi Mays, a doctoral student in the Department of History, conducted research in Mexico, Turkey, France, and Israel in 2010-2011 for her dissertation, "Komo el Pasharo ke Bola, Like the Bird that Flies: The Migration of Sephardic Jews from the Ottoman Empire and Turkey to Mexico, 1908-1940.”
Anya Quilitzsch (History) completed her M.A. at Harvard. A research assistant for the AHEYM project, her research focuses on Russian-Jewish history, and memory and Jewish-Ukranian relations.
Amy Simon is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History writing on Holocaust victim perceptions of perpetrators in Poland as represented in Yiddish diaries. She previously completed her B.A. in English at the University of Texas at Austin and her M.A. in Holocaust Studies at University College London.
Devorah Shubowitz (Anthropology) received a 2011-2012 Wenner Gren grant for her current dissertation fieldwork on how women in liberal Jewish communities interpret gendered sacred texts and apply their studies in their lives.
Margot Valles, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Comparative Literature, is researching her dissertation on the adaptation of Christian themes for a Jewish audience in late medieval early renaissance Yiddish and Hebrew romances.
Leah Cover is a first year master’s degree student in Jewish Studies. She attended ulpan at Hebrew University in Summer 2011.
Isaac Finkelstein, a first year master’s degree student, graduated from Johns Hopkins University where he received a minor in Jewish Studies with a focus on Yiddish Language and Literature, and he also attended the Vilnius Yiddish Institute in Summer 2010.
Joseph Hayden, a first year master’s degree student, studied Modern Hebrew at Middlebury College during Summer 2010. He has research interests in religious texts as well as modern Jewish identity.
