Research by the Center Affiliated Faculty
In October, Prof. Joseph Bathanti (IDS/JHP) gave a talk on Alma Stone Williams, in tandem with her son, Dr. Russell Williams for Asheville’s Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center. Alma Stone Williams was the College’s first African American student, and arguably the first African American student in attend (in 1944) an all-white college in the Jim Crow South. Bathanti completed a chapter entitled “Outside Inside: The Prison Writing and Teaching of Fielding Dawson” for a forthcoming volume by Clemson UP and published “Di Bo Chet” in the journal War, Literature & the Arts along with several poems in the current issue of the Appalachian Journal. One of his poems was selected for the Poetry in Plain Sight initiative and will soon be on public display in street-visible locations throughout Winston-Salem and several other NC cities. Finally, Bathanti was nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Award in short fiction.
Prof. Rosemary Horowitz (English/JHP) participated in two panels at the Association for Jewish Studies 2020 annual conference: “Women’s Holocaust Testimonies Across Media and Over Time: Toward New Patterns of Representation” and “Uses and Abuses of Art in Representations of Holocaust Violence.” Also, her article “Jewish Undercurrents in the Jean-Pierre Melville’s films La Silence of de la Mer; Leon Morin, Prêtre; and L’Armee des Ombres” is currently under review.
Together with several other German-born directors of North American Holocaust studies centers, Prof.
Thomas Pegelow Kaplan (JHP/History) published an op-ed entitled “It is not too late for American Democracy-yet” in the American-Jewish periodical The Forward in September. He gave several talks about his co-edited volume, "Resisting Persecution: Jews and their Petitions during the Holocaust" (New York, 2020) that appeared earlier this year and has been nominated for the National Jewish Book Awards. Jointly with co-editor Prof. Wolf Gruner, the director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, he also published a contribution entitled “Do Petitions matter? Rethinking Jewish Petitioning during the Holocaust” on Berghahn Book’s blog. He co-organized (with Prof. Norm Goda, University of Florida at Gainesville) a conference panel on “Holocaust Studies and Theory” for this fall’s (virtual) annual meeting of the German Studies Association and gave a paper on “A Transnational Turn in Holocaust Studies? Reflections and Reconsiderations.” In addition, Pegelow Kaplan was invited and participated in the (virtual) 2020 “Jewish Refugees In Global Transit: Spaces – Temporalities - Interactions“ workshop at the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., and, as a panel commentator, in the (virtual) annual conference of the Association for Jewish Studies in December. Finally, he submitted a book manuscript entitled "Taking the Transnational Turn: The German Jewish Press and Journalism Beyond Borders, 1933-1943" to be published in Hebrew by Yad Vashem, Israel, and signed a book contract for a new co-edited collection on "Holocaust Testimonies: Reassessing Survivors’ Voices and their Future in Challenging Times" with Bloomsbury, London, UK.
In the summer of 2020, Prof. Dana Powell (Anthropology/JHP) completed a year-long fellowship at the Cornell Society for the Humanities. Prof. Powell, whose work supports Peace Studies at the Center, also launched a new project on Socio-Ecological Harm and Resilience in eastern North Carolina with a $10,000 Chancellor’s Innovation Scholar’s Award (with co-PI Dr. Rebecca Witter, Sustainable Development). Finally, this fall, she published a co-written article entitled “Making It Home: Solidarity and Belonging in the #NoDAPL/Standing Rock Encampments” in Collaborative Anthropologies.
Prof. Rosemary Horowitz (English/JHP) participated in two panels at the Association for Jewish Studies 2020 annual conference: “Women’s Holocaust Testimonies Across Media and Over Time: Toward New Patterns of Representation” and “Uses and Abuses of Art in Representations of Holocaust Violence.” Also, her article “Jewish Undercurrents in the Jean-Pierre Melville’s films La Silence of de la Mer; Leon Morin, Prêtre; and L’Armee des Ombres” is currently under review.
Together with several other German-born directors of North American Holocaust studies centers, Prof.
Thomas Pegelow Kaplan (JHP/History) published an op-ed entitled “It is not too late for American Democracy-yet” in the American-Jewish periodical The Forward in September. He gave several talks about his co-edited volume, "Resisting Persecution: Jews and their Petitions during the Holocaust" (New York, 2020) that appeared earlier this year and has been nominated for the National Jewish Book Awards. Jointly with co-editor Prof. Wolf Gruner, the director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, he also published a contribution entitled “Do Petitions matter? Rethinking Jewish Petitioning during the Holocaust” on Berghahn Book’s blog. He co-organized (with Prof. Norm Goda, University of Florida at Gainesville) a conference panel on “Holocaust Studies and Theory” for this fall’s (virtual) annual meeting of the German Studies Association and gave a paper on “A Transnational Turn in Holocaust Studies? Reflections and Reconsiderations.” In addition, Pegelow Kaplan was invited and participated in the (virtual) 2020 “Jewish Refugees In Global Transit: Spaces – Temporalities - Interactions“ workshop at the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., and, as a panel commentator, in the (virtual) annual conference of the Association for Jewish Studies in December. Finally, he submitted a book manuscript entitled "Taking the Transnational Turn: The German Jewish Press and Journalism Beyond Borders, 1933-1943" to be published in Hebrew by Yad Vashem, Israel, and signed a book contract for a new co-edited collection on "Holocaust Testimonies: Reassessing Survivors’ Voices and their Future in Challenging Times" with Bloomsbury, London, UK.
In the summer of 2020, Prof. Dana Powell (Anthropology/JHP) completed a year-long fellowship at the Cornell Society for the Humanities. Prof. Powell, whose work supports Peace Studies at the Center, also launched a new project on Socio-Ecological Harm and Resilience in eastern North Carolina with a $10,000 Chancellor’s Innovation Scholar’s Award (with co-PI Dr. Rebecca Witter, Sustainable Development). Finally, this fall, she published a co-written article entitled “Making It Home: Solidarity and Belonging in the #NoDAPL/Standing Rock Encampments” in Collaborative Anthropologies.