Grad Students: Alumni

Jocelyn Burney was a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies, and graduated in spring 2023. 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.

Luke Drake was a doctoral student of Ancient Mediterranean Religions in the Religious Studies Department. His research interests include Jewish-Christian relations in antiquity and the ancient transmission and interpretation of Jewish and Christian literature. He has worked with the Center for the Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts on the Vatican Syriac Manuscript Project, and he is the editor of The Emergence of Christianity (Mohr Seibeck, 2013), a collection of the papers of the Swiss biblical scholar, François Bovon.

Tine Rassalle was a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religious Studies, Ancient Mediterranean Religions track. She received her BA and MA in Archaeology of the Ancient Near East at the University of Gent (Belgium) Belgium and a second BA in Hebrew and Aramaic languages and cultures at the University of Leiden (the Netherlands). She is interested in archaeology, more specifically in the material culture of ancient Judaism and early Christianity in the Middle East. She has conducted over 20 excavations and has been a staff member on multiple digs in Israel. She is currently writing her dissertation on coin hoards that have been found in ancient synagogues in Palestine.

Joshua Shelly joined the Carolina-Duke German Studies program in Fall 2016 and graduated in spring 2023. 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).

Justine Orlovsky-Schnitzler was a MA student in the Folklore program working on the Yiddish music and poetry of Jewish partisans with Dr. Gabrielle Berlinger. She is a regular contributor to the Jewish Women’s Archive and Lilith Magazine, and her work has been featured in the Bitter Southerner, the New York Times, and the Harvard Civil Liberties Review.

Max Lazar was a PhD Candidate in history. His dissertation is a local study of Jewish integration in Frankfurt am Main between 1914 and 1938. Max’s research interests include modern Germany, modern Jewish history, urban history, and spatial theory. In spring 2020 and spring 2021, Max led a new, one-credit course on Confronting Antisemitism. Max was the Center’s Goodman Fellow for 2020-2021.

Robin Buller was a doctoral candidate in the history department, where she is advised by Dr. Karen Auerbach and Dr. Donald Reid. Her dissertation examines the history of Sephardi Jewish immigrants in Paris during the interwar period and the Holocaust. Hailing from the recently dismantled Ottoman Empire, this population numbered upwards of twenty thousand individuals at the outbreak of the Second World War. Dr. Buller received doctoral funding from the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies in the form of the year-long Graduate Fellowship (2017), the Christopher Browning Holocaust Studies Research and Travel Grant (2017), and the Summer Stipend (2015). Her research has also been supported by the American Academy for Jewish Research and the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University. Dr.Buller also was a Saul Kagan Fellow for Advanced Shoah Studies through the Conference for Jewish Material Claims against Germany.

Bradley Erickson was a graduate student in Religious Studies, concentrating in the field of ancient Mediterranean Religions. He graduated from Centre College in 2009 with a double major in History and Religious Studies. In 2012, he received a Master of Divinity from Duke Divinity School. For the past several summers, Bradley has worked with Dr. Jodi Magness at the Huqoq Excavation Project in the Galilee of Israel. His research interests include Second Temple Judaism, early Christianity, and studying the relationship between material culture and religious text. He was awarded the Center’s Goodman Dissertation Fellowship in 2018-2019. He earned his Ph.D., and a graduate certificate in Jewish Studies, in spring 2020.

Travis Alexander was a doctoral fellow in UNC’s Department of English and Comparative Literature. He received a B.A. in Plan II Honors and English at The University of Texas at Austin in 2013. His research considers the leveraging of Jewish identity in postmodern American novels—particularly those of non-Jewish writers like Thomas Pynchon. Also within the scope of Jewish Studies, Travis is interested in the rise of midcentury-modern domestic architecture in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 50s, and its association with the photography of Julius Shulman. After graduating from Carolina, Travis went to Rice University for a post-doc position.

Erika Huckestein was a doctoral student in the Department of History at UNC. She received her BA in History from Carleton College in 2010 and her MA in History from UNC in 2013. Her dissertation focuses on the intersections between British women’s activism, anti-fascism, pacifism and international politics in the period between the two world wars. For three years, she was the Graduate Assistant for the Center. After graduating, she went on to hold an adjunct faculty position at Rowan College, N.J.

Guy Shalev was a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology. He received his B.A. in Psychology and Sociology, and his M.A. in Anthropology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on politics of expertise and border making in Israel/Palestine. Guy’s dissertation research looks into the experiences of Palestinian physicians in the Israeli health system. He is particularly interested in the practice and assertion of medical neutrality, examining how it conceals political conflict and difference but also how it serves as a ground for social mobility and political action for Palestinian physicians in Israel. He was the Center’s 2014-2015 Silver Fellow. After Carolina, he went on to hold the Shapiro Postdoctoral Fellowship at Tel Aviv University.

Scott Krause was a doctoral candidate in the Department of History. His work examines Berlin’s transformation from the capital of Nazi Germany to a symbol of freedom and resilient democracy in the Cold War. His research has unearthed how this remarkable development derived from a network of liberal American occupation officials, and returned émigrés, or remigrés, of the formerly Marxist Social Democratic Party (SPD). In the summer of 2015, the Center’s funding has allowed Scott to research motivations for return in Dutch and German archives. He is currently working as a scholar in Germany.

Meghan Harter was a doctoral student in Education, Cultural Studies and Literacies. She is a recipient of the Native American Initiative Fellowship (2013-2014) and the Samuel M. Holton Graduate Fellowship in Foundations of Education (2014-Present). She received a M.A.T. in Special Education, Mild to Moderate Disorders, and completed a graduate certificate in Academically or Intellectually Gifted (AIG) Education from Western Carolina University. She also has a B.A. in Psychology from Maryville College in Maryville, Tennessee. She taught for three years as an English Language Arts/Special Education teacher for North Carolina public schools before returning to graduate school. Meghan is currently researching diaspora studies in relation to identity formation within Jewish and Native American populations and culturally relevant pedagogy within project-based learning.

Anna Kushkova was a PhD student at the Department on Anthropology. She has been engaged in the field study of the Jewish population in her native city of St. Petersburg, as well as in Western Ukraine and Moldova. She had received her BA in foreign languages at A.I. Herzen State Pedagogical University in St. Petersburg, an MA in English Literature at the University of Northern Iowa, and an equivalent of PhD in Ethnology at the European University at St. Petersburg. She was the Center’s Silver Fellow for 2013-2014. In 2019-2020, she joined the Katz Center at University of Pennsylvania as a fellow.

Josh Parshall was a doctoral student in the Department of American Studies. He is interested in American Jewish identity, with an emphasis on the American south. His current research focuses on the activities of the Southern District of the Workmen’s Circle during the first half of the twentieth century. Previously, Josh worked as an oral historian in Jewish communities throughout the region. He holds a BA in American studies from the University of Kansas and an MA in folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is now the Director of the History Department at the Institute of Southern Jewish Life in Jackson, Mississippi.

Annegret Oehme was a graduate student in the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies. She received her B.A. in Jewish Studies and her M.A. in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature and Language from Freie Universität in Berlin. Her research interests include medieval and early modern German and Yiddish literature. For her dissertation project she researched the various adaptations and transformations of the story of the Arthurian knight Wigalois, across different languages (Yiddish and German) and different media (manuscripts, prints, wall paintings, comics) from the 13th to the 21st centuries. Annegret earned her Ph.D., plus a graduate certificate in Jewish Studies. In fall 2016, she joined the faculty at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Samuel J. Kessler received his BA from New York University and MA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In May 2016, he earned his Ph.D. from UNC in the Department of Religious Studies along with a graduate certificate in Jewish Studies. His dissertation, entitled “A New Shoot From the House of David: Adolf Jellinek and the Creation of the Modern Rabbinate,” traces the history and development of the role of the rabbi and the rabbi’s sermon in the modernization of Judaism during the nineteenth century. In fall 2016 he joined Virginia Tech as a visiting professor and then moved to a faculty position at Gustavus Adolphus College.

Elissa Sampson earned her Ph.D. in geography in May 2016, and also completed the graduate certificate in Jewish Studies. Her dissertation documented how the acquisition of a Lower East Side building shaped the Lower East Side Tenement Museum’s stories of immigrant history. Elissa is a visiting scholar at the Jewish studies program at Cornell.

Matthew Dougherty is a doctoral student in the Department of Religious Studies in the Religion in the Americas track. He graduated from Amherst College with a B.A. in Religion and English, and from Harvard Divinity School with a Master of Theological Studies (MTS). His dissertation focuses on the “Jewish Indian theory”– the idea that some or all Native Americans are the descendants of Ancient Israelites– in the United States during the early Nineteenth century. It argues that American Protestant readings of Judaism and the Hebrew Scriptures shaped changing concepts of Natives and whiteness. His broader interests include missions and Native American religion in North America from the colonial period to the mid-nineteenth century.

Daniel Schindler is a graduate student in the Department of Classics where he studies the archaeology of  Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Palestine, specializing in ceramics. He received his B.A. in classical and near eastern archaeology, Latin and Greek from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities and M.A. in classical archaeology from UNC – Chapel Hill. He has worked at two sites in Israel: Tel Kedesh directed by Andrea Berlin and Sharon Herbert, and most recently the Huqoq excavation project under the direction of Jodi Magness and David Amit as the site ceramicist. For his dissertation he will be creating a typology and chronology of the local Galilean plain wares of the 4th through 6th centuries CE.

Steve Werlin was a graduate student in the Department of Religious Studies where he studied the archaeology of Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine  Palestine, as well as ancient Judaism. His research interests included Ancient  Synagogue Art and Architecture, Hasmonean and Herodian Architecture and History, and Jewish Religious Practices in the Classical and Near Eastern world.