Research by the Center Affiliated Faculty
Center Director Dr. T. Pegelow Kaplan's latest book, a co-edited essay collection, was published in early July
Prof. Davis Hankins (REL/JHP) published a chapter on “Job” in Samuel L. Adams et al., eds., The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Wisdom Literature (Malden, Mass.: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2020).
Prof. Rosemary Horowitz (English/JHP) completed an article tentatively entitled “Using Yizkor Books in Holocaust Education” that is currently under review. She used the concept of collective witnessing to analyze these books. Another article about the Jewish-French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville’s resistance movies is in process.
The creative writing program for Vietnam veterans with PTSD that Prof. Joseph Bathanti (IDS/JHP) co-founded at the Charles George VA Medical Center in Asheville was awarded “best practice” status by the VA and received a sizeable grant that allowed him and his collaborators to generalize the program to several other VA Medical Centers in the region. At the NC Writers Network Annual Fall Conference last year, Bathanti also introduced a staged reading by Vietnam veterans. In December, he offered a day-long training session for writers and clinicians to be deployed to the VA medical centers that started the program. Strongly intersecting with his other work in Peace Studies, this initiative continues to garner attention on a statewide and national level. Bathanti also published several poems, including “Saint Francis’s Satyr Butterfly.”
In late 2019, Prof. Thomas Pegelow Kaplan (JHP/History) published a co-edited volume on Holocaust historiography with Dr. Juergen Matthaeus, the Director of Applied Research at the USHMM’s Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and the renowned Schoeningh Verlag in Germany. Entitled Beyond Ordinary Men: Christopher R. Browning and Holocaust Historiography, it brings together essays by prominent senior and upcoming junior Holocaust scholars in the U.S., Canada, Germany, and Israel that evaluate the oeuvre of Christopher R. Browning, one of the most influential scholars in the field.
More recently, in June 2020, Pegelow Kaplan published an edited collection on Jewish petitioning practices during the Shoah with Prof. Wolf Gruner, the Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Appearing in a series by the important New York City-based publisher Berghahn Books, Resisting Persecution: Jews and their Petitions during the Holocaust already received praise from several scholars. Marion A. Kaplan (New York University) called it “a thought-provoking and entirely new approach to Holocaust Studies.” Pegelow Kaplan was also invited to present at conferences in Germany and Omaha and received four external grants in support of a research conference here on campus.
In Fall 2019, Dr. Pegelow Kaplan published a co-edited volume on Holocaust historiography with a special emphasis on Prof. Christopher R. Browning's influential oeuvre