Adviser: Konrad Jarausch

Graduate Email: mskalski@live.unc.edu

Education

B.A. Rutgers University, 2014
M.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016
Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2021

Research Interests

My dissertation, “A Socialist Neighborhood: Cross-Border Exchanges between Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, 1969-1989,” explores successes and failures of internationalism and integration in the Eastern Bloc. In it, I study the lived experience of border crossing, i.e. the social, cultural, and economic practices in borderlands, and transnational cooperation under state socialism.

Adviser: Richard J. A. Talbert

Graduate Email: Imholman@live.unc.edu

Education

B.A. North Carolina State University, 2013
M.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2015
Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2021

Research Interests

My dissertation, “Herzog’s Roman Tesserae: Their Nature and Purpose Revisited,” grounds the interpretation of Herzog’s tesserae in their physical appearance and inscriptions, rather than solely investigating the prosopography of the named individuals. My research interests broadly are Roman economic and social history, history of slavery, and Roman material culture.

Adviser: Konrad H. Jarausch

Graduate Email: mhlazar927@gmail.com

Education

BA College of William & Mary, 2012
MA University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2015
PhD University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2021
Dissertation: Jerusalem on the Main: Jewish Integration in Frankfurt, 1914-1938

Research Interests

My research interests include modern Germany, Jewish history, Holocaust history, urban history, and spatial theory. My dissertation, titled “Jerusalem on the Main,” is a local study of Jewish integration in Frankfurt am Main between 1914 and 1938. Until now, there has been a historical consensus that the First World War marked a negative turning point of what, until then, had been an upward arc of Jewish integration in Germany that had begun in the late eighteenth century. I challenge this master narrative of German-Jewish history by arguing that the Jews of Frankfurt continued to enjoy a high level of integration into the political, educational, cultural, and social life of their surrounding society until the Nazi Party’s seizure of power in 1933. Furthermore, I use examinations of local literature, popular culture, and the history of Jewish street names to show how scholars have frequently overlooked continuities in Jewish integration in Germany during the years preceding the Holocaust.

Adviser: Karen Auerbach and Donald M. Reid

Graduate Email: rmbuller@live.unc.edu

Education

B.A. University of Toronto, 2014
M.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016
Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2021
Dissertation: Ottoman Jews in Paris: Sephardi Immigrant Community, Culture, and Identity, 1918-1939

Research Interests

Personal Website

I am a historian of migration, the Jewish Mediterranean, and modern France. I am particularly interested in questions of language, citizenship, and transnational networks. My dissertation (UNC 2021) examined Sephardi Jewish immigrants from the Ottoman Empire in twentieth-century Paris, with a focus on collective identity, communal life, and belonging in the Third Republic. Current and future research projects concentrate on the Holocaust, French colonialism, and immigrant identity in France.

Adviser: Susan Pennybacker

Graduate Email: mlreeves@live.unc.edu

Education

B.A. Western Kentucky University, 2012
M.A. Western Kentucky University, 2014
Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2021

Research Interests

My research focuses on the global history of anticolonialism in the twentieth century, especially intersections between anticolonialism and various forms of internationalism. My dissertation, “Lost Horizons: Anticolonial Internationalism, 1930-1970,” compares the internationalist and anticolonial careers of four leaders from different regions: Shukri al-Quwatli (1892-1967), the first president of Syria; V.K. Krishna Menon (1896-1974), the Indian diplomat and Minister of Defense; Carlos Romulo (1898-1985), the journalist and diplomat from the Philippines; and Nnamdi Azikiwe (1902-96), activist editor and first president of Nigeria.

Recent Publications

“‘Free and Equal Partners in Your Commonwealth’: The Atlantic Charter and Anticolonial Delegations to London, 1941-3,” Twentieth Century British History 29, no. 2 (June 2018): 259-283

“Teaching Decolonization beyond the Nation: The Case of West Africa,” World History Connected 13, no. 2 (June 2016)

Adviser: Marcus Bull

Graduate Email: morgandw@live.unc.edu

Education

BA Trinity College, 2013
MA University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2015
PhD University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2021
Dissertation: Historiographical Narratives of Violence, Sacrality, and Community in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Italy: Genoa, Pisa, and the Mezzogiorno, c.1080-c.1170.

Research Interests

I am a cultural historian specializing in interregional, interdisciplinary, and narratological approaches to the study of medieval Italy, with research projects on medieval history-writing, twelfth-century political and religious culture, and ideologies of holy war. My dissertation is an analysis of the ways in which medieval historical narrative texts represented and reconciled anxieties regarding the experience of violence and its role in shaping political life in Latin Christian society, with particular reference to the historiographical projects of Genoa, Pisa, and the Mezzogiorno. I argue that – for these societies – narrative historical texts functioned as articulations of political myths, in that they were discursive spaces within which the experience of political life, specifically the anxieties surrounding boundary-making and the infliction of harm, could be sublimated within a shared religious culture system. This project offers a contribution to our understanding of the development of political cultures within Latin Christendom in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, presents an analytical framework for approaching ambiguous medieval historical narratives, and demonstrates a way of considering northern and southern Italian history together as thematically interrelated.

Adviser: Klaus Larres and Miguel La Serna

Education

B.S. Bryant University, 2008
M.A. Northeastern University, 2014
Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2021

Research Interests

Alyssa’s dissertation focuses on the Chile solidarity movements in Western Europe from 1973 until Augusto Pinochet’s arrest in London in 1998. Focusing especially on the movements in France, Italy, and Spain, her project examines the role that the Chile solidarity movement played in the transformation of the European left, from an emphasis on anti-fascism and anti-imperialism to a human rights-based orientation. It also seeks to understand the way that this leftist transformation came to bear on Chile during and in the wake of the country’s “return to democracy,” as Europeans invested their time and financial resources in civil-society building and human rights projects in Chile. While these resources were often offered at the bequest of Chilean elites, such forms of solidarity were routed in specific European contexts and differed notably from the solidarity offered in 1973. In this way, Alyssa’s project looks to both historicize the concept of solidarity and trace the global logic of neoliberalism.

Adviser: Harry L. Watson

Graduate Email: fennessy@live.unc.edu

Education

B.A. Sewanee: University of the South, 2012
M.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2014
Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2021

Research Interests

My dissertation, “Reconstructed Rebels: The Ex-Confederate Allies of Congressional Reconstruction,” examines former Confederates who joined the Republican Party. My research interests include 19th and 20th century U.S. history and the long history of American empire, nation-building, political institutions, and citizenship.

Adviser: Harry Watson

Graduate Email: lucaspk@live.unc.edu

Education

B.A. Centre College, 2013
M.A. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2015
Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2021

Research Interests

My research interests focus on Native peoples, the United States during the Early Republic, and the U.S. South.

Recent Publications

“A Divided State in a Divided Nation: An Exploration of East Tennessee’s Support of the Union in the Secession Crisis of 1860-1861.” Journal of East Tennessee History 84 (2013): 3-22.

“‘The Noblest Enterprise of Modern Times’ : Robert Y. Hayne’s 1836 Address to the Knoxville Convention.” Journal of East Tennessee History 87 (2016): 93-107.

“Ardent Nullifier and Gradual Emancipator: The Paradox of Virginia Governor John Floyd.” Southern Historian 37 (Spring 2016): 23-45.

Adviser: Konrad H. Jarausch and Karen Auerbach

Graduate Email: drweiner@stanford.edu

Education

AB Vassar College, 2012 (History and Italian)
MS Johns Hopkins University, 2014 (Education)
MA University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2017 (History)
PhD University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill, 2020 (History)
Graduate Certificate in Jewish Studies, 2020

PhD Dissertation: “Teaching a Dark Chapter: Representations of the Holocaust and the Second World War in East German, West German, and Italian History Textbooks, 1943-2000”

Research Interests

Daniela R. P. Weiner is a Jim Joseph Postdoctoral Fellow in the Concentration in Education & Jewish Studies at Stanford Graduate School of Education at Stanford University.

She is a historian of modern European history and the Holocaust. Her current monograph project explores how the post-fascist countries of East Germany, West Germany, and Italy taught about the Second World War and the Holocaust in their educational systems. It specifically explores the representations of these events in textbooks. A future project will focus on baptism and conversion during the Holocaust.

Weiner’s research has been funded by the Jim Joseph Foundation, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, the German Historical Institute, Washington D.C., and the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies. During summer 2020, she was a Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar Follow-Up Grantee at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Recent Publications