Fellows
Meghann Pytka, PhD, is an instructional specialist in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. She is also a lecturer in the School of Professional Studies at Northwestern University.
Yuri Radchenko is the director of the Center for Research on Interethnic Relations in Eastern Europe (Kharkiv, Ukraine). He is currently working on his project "Andrii Mel’nyk: the OUN Leader’s Life History and the Memory of Him and His Movement".
Agata Jankowska is a doctoral student at the Institute of History, University of Szczecin, and a graduate in history from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Her MA dissertation titled “The Muselmann condition. Giorgio Agamben’s ideas versus the sources and witness account literature” was granted a honorable mention at the Majer Bałaban competition organized by the Jewish Historical Institute.
Mackenzie Pierce received his PhD in musicology from Cornell University, where his research examined the aftermath of the Second World War in Polish and Polish-Jewish musical culture. A highlight of this work was the scholarship and performance festival “Forbidden Songs”.
Stephan Stach is a historian, he worked at the Institute for Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. His current research project focuses on the role of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw for the construction of Holocaust memory during the Cold War.
Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe is a research associate at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut of the Freie Universität Berlin. He studied cultural history at the Viadrina European University and holds a PhD from the Universität Hamburg. He currently explores the German-Polish collaboration during World War II and the attitudes of city mayors in the General Government.
Jan Rybak is a PhD candidate at the Department of History and Civilization of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His research focuses on the Zionist movement in East-Central Europe during World War One and its immediate aftermath. The project examines local practices of Zionist activists within the Jewish communities.
Dr. Madeleine Cohen received her PhD in Comparative Literature with a designated emphasis in Jewish Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016. This year she has been the Preceptor in Yiddish at Harvard University and in the fall she will begin a position as the Director of Translation and Collections Initiatives at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (ingeveb.org).
Darius Sakalauskas is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Vilnius University, Lithuania with a research focus on the economic history of the late Grand Duchy of Lithuania. His doctoral project is entitled Socio-economic processes in the 17-18th c. Vilnius: the management of private capital, where the different groups of the city’s socio-economic agents will be analyzed through their engagement with the private capital: its accumulation, investment practices, rationale of the decisions, partnerships and their distance. One of the specific groups analyzed will be the local Jewish community and its individual members.
Eleanor (Ellie) Shapiro is a Ph.D. candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies and Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California. The longtime producer of the Jewish Music Festival in Berkeley, she also worked as an English teacher and journalist in Israel for nine years. She has received fellowships from research institutions in the United States and Europe.
Dr. Anna Novikov received her Ph.D. degree in History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2013. During her doctoral studies she was a Fellow at many well-known research institutions and universities, e.g. the Oxford University.
Dr Alicja Maślak-Maciejewska is a historian specializing in Jewish Studies, currently a faculty member at the Department of Jewish History in the Institute of Jewish Studies of the Jagiellonian University. Her academic interests include the history of Jews in the 19th century, the history of Galician Jewry, progressive Judaism and progressive synagogues (especially in Krakow and Lviv) in the Polish lands.
Mariusz KałczewiakMariusz Kałczewiak is a cultural historian with a research focus on Jewish Studies and Latin American Studies. He has just submitted his PhD dissertation “Jewish polacos, Argentina, and the Yiddishland. Negotiating Transnational Identities, 1914-1939”, written at the Tel Aviv University and Justus Liebig University in Giessen (Germany).
Sofija GrachovaDr. Sofija Grachowa holds a Ph.D. from the Department of History, Harvard University, in addition to MA diplomas from Central European University in Hungary and National University of Kyiv - Mohyla Academy in Ukraine, respectively. Her thesis was titled ‘Pathologies of Civility: Jews, Health, Race & Citizenship in the Russian Empire and the Bolshevik State, 1830-1930’.
Urszula (Ula) Madej-Krupitski is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of California, Berkeley, United States. While on a 4-month POLIN Research Fellowship, Ula will be working on her doctoral project entitled Mapping Jewish Poland: Material Culture, Everyday Life and Identity Negotiations in the Interwar Period.
Dr Katharina FriedlaDr. Katharina Friedla is a Research Fellow in the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem. Katharina Friedla holds a Ph.D. from the Department of History, Institute of Eastern European and Jewish History, University of Basel, Switzerland. Her thesis was entitled "Jewish Living Spaces in Breslau and in Wrocław", "1933–1949: Dealing and Survival Strategies, Self-Assertion and Identity, Persecution Experience".
Natalia RomikNatalia Romik is a Ph.D. candidate at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK. Her doctoral project is entitled Post-Jewish architecture of memory within former Eastern European shtetls. Natalia Romik holds an MA from the University of Warsaw. She has published several articles on Jewish architecture, including Nothing is going to change? Adaptation of the Jewish Pre-Burial House in Gliwice in the Journal for Eastern European Jewish Affairs (August 2015).
Dr Jolanta MickutėDr. Jolanta Mickute has worked as an Assistant Professor of History in the Department of Political Science and Diplomacy at Vytautas Magnus University and at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University, Lithuania. She is also part of the Lithuanian non-governmental organization Ethnic Kitchen which pursues projects on multi-cultural and civic education by means of art and innovative educational methods: http://www.pasauliovirtuve.org/en/.
The GEOP Research Fellowship is offered by POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in cooperation with the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute within the framework of the Global Education Outreach Program. This program was made possible thanks to Taube Philanthropies, the William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation, and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.
