Graduate Students

Jocelyn Burney is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies. She received an MAR with a concentration in Second Temple Judaism from Yale Divinity School and a BA in Religious Studies and Archaeology from UNC. Her dissertation analyzes the funding, construction, and maintenance of synagogues and burials by diaspora Jewish communities in the late Roman Aegean. Her research has recently been supported by fellowships from the Archaeological Institute of America and the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. Jocelyn is also an area supervisor for the Huqoq Excavation Project, a UNC-led excavation of a late antique Jewish village and synagogue in lower eastern Galilee.

Brian A. Coussens is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies. Brian received a BA in Anthropology & History from Georgia Southern University in 2006, a MA in New Testament Archaeology from Wheaton College in 2008, and a MA in Religious Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2014. His research focuses on the archaeology and history of early Judaism. His dissertation examines how Herod the Great’s burial site fits within his architectural corpora and cultural contexts. His recent research projects examine Second Temple Judaism by understanding Jewish material culture as a means of self-representation and self-identity and as a means of cultural negotiation in an ever-changing socio-political climate.

Alison Curry is a PhD student in the History Department. She studies modern Polish-Jewish history, the Holocaust, and collective memory. Alison graduated from St. Mary’s College of Maryland with a B.A. in Anthropology and History. She also has a Graduate Certificate in Digital Public Humanities from George Mason University and a Masters degree in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Gratz College. Her current research focuses on the function of Jewish cemeteries in Poland during World War II and the immediate post-war.

Oskar Czendze is a PhD candidate in the History Department. His research interests include modern Jewish history, the cultural and social history of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe, and the Jewish immigrant experience in the United States. He is particularly interested in questions of belonging and place in the modern era, memory, and transnationalism. Oskar’s dissertation, under the supervision of Dr. Karen Auerbach, will explore the life and migration experience of Jews from the Habsburg province of Galicia from the late 19th century until the outbreak of the Second World War. In 2015-16, he spent an academic year as an exchange graduate student at Emory University. In 2017, he graduated with an MA in Modern and Contemporary History from the University of Augsburg, Germany.

Tessa Gurney is a doctoral student in the Romance Languages department. She specializes in Early Modern Italian theater, and is writing a dissertation on the figure of the Jewish Other in late cinquecento and early seicento comedy. The first chapter of her project, a study on the Jewish and Muslim presence in the work of capocomico Giovan Battista Andreini, is to be included in the volume The Medici and the Levant: 
Interlacing Cultures from Florence to the Eastern Mediterranean (1532-1743), forthcoming in 2014. She is currently the Samuel Kress fellow at the Medici Archive Project, a digital humanities initiative based at the State Archive in Florence, Italy.

Jordan Klevdal’s research focuses on questions of memory and nostalgia in the U.S. during the early 20th century. Her past work has examined the ways in which shifts in photographic technology, political borders and intellectual thought have changed literature’s relationship to memory. Specifically, she is interested in the early history of photography and its relationship to memory and questions of immigrant belonging. In the future, she hopes to work on Yiddish periodicals and newspapers to examine the way text and image interact with one another to produce a sense of belonging based on a network that is not only historical and memorial, but creative.

Joshua Shelly joined the Carolina-Duke German Studies program in Fall 2016. He holds a BA in German and History from Wayne State University (2011), and an MLS (2013) and MA in Religious Studies (2015) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research field covers German Jewish literature during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his dissertation, he explores the role of German Jewish literature, especially utopian works, in imagining a future Jewish state. His dissertation research has been supported by fellowships from the Leo Baeck Institute (2019–2020) and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies (2020–2021).