Graduate Students
Jovana Babovic is a PhD student in the History Department at Illinois. She is interested in prewar and interwar Eastern Europe,
especially the Balkans. Her academic concerns center around intellectual history, transnationalism, diasporas, literature, fin-de-siècle sadness, homelessness, nostalgia, and forbidden love. Currently, Jovana is focusing on comparative experiences of Jewish communities in Thessaloniki, Sarajevo, and Russia, taking special interest in the processes of post-imperial nationalization, cultural assimilation, modernization, and inter-religious relations. In her past work, Jovana has focused on Yugoslavia, particularly engaging the tools of psychoanalysis to understand gender and relationship metaphors prevalent in nation-building rhetoric. She completed her undergraduate studies in French language and literature and neuroscience at Smith College, and has an MA from NYU’s Center for European and Mediterranean Studies and an MA in Central European history from CEU in Budapest.
Jacob Baum enrolled at the University of Illinois in 2006 and has since been working towards a PhD in the History Department.
His research centers on cultural history, the history of daily life, and the history of the senses among and between Jews and Christians in central Europe from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Triangulating between Jewish, Protestant and Catholic communities, his dissertation attempts to demonstrate how cultural factors such as language, foodways, religious belief and practice determine how people understand their senses, and indeed, how they are able to employ them to experience the world around them. His other research interests include traditions of witchcraft, demonology and exorcism in the early modern world, and the history of blood.
Nadja Berkovich is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She was born in Ukraine and educated at St. Petersburg’s Herzen University, Humboldt University in Berlin, and Boston College. She specializes in the study 
of late-19th-century and pre-WWII Yiddish and Russian realist and modernist literatures. Her area of interest is “cultural pluralism,” analyzing and investigating the intersections of Yiddish with Russian, Ukrainian and German literatures and cultures. She is currently working on a dissertation project that investigates the relationship between cultural identity formation, national selfhood, and the process of assimilation. Among others, she hopes to answer the following questions: How much assimilation is appropriate while still remaining Jewish? What constituted Jewishness at the turn of the twentieth century in Russia? Nadja is also interested in the Moscow Yiddish Theater, Yiddish cinema, and art and ethnography; and her ultimate goal is to examine Yiddish culture as a Gesamtkunstwerk.
Melinda Bernardo is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology. Her research interests include the anthropology of Jews and Judaism, nationalism and belonging, medical technologies, and ethnography as representation. She is developing her dissertation project around questions of immigration and medical practices in Israeli society. She is currently the Secretary/Treasurer of the National Association of Student Anthropologists (NASA), a section of the American Anthropological Association. Prior to this position she served as Contributing Editor for NASA’s monthly column in Anthropology News. Melinda received her MA in anthropology from the New School of Social Research in New York City.
Melissa Bushnick is a master’s student in Art History who graduated summa cum laude from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in May 2008. Her primary focus is on post-World War II American and European art and the representation of memory, particularly as it pertains to Jewish culture and history. Also important to her research is the ways in which photography plays a role in the visualization of memory, especially in terms of the features and assumptions inherent in the medium itself. Melissa serves as the curator of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society. In that capacity, she is currently working on the installation of a site-specific artwork by the Chicago-based artist Mindy Rose Schwartz to be unveiled in the Jewish Studies Office in the fall of 2008. Melissa has held internships at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Spertus Museum in Chicago. Her plan is to pursue curatorial work upon the completion of her PhD in Art History.
Mary DeGuire is a doctoral student in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. She developed her interest in
Jewish culture and literature as well as the Yiddish language during her studies at the University of Illinois and has participated in related workshops, language classes, and seminars both in the US and abroad. In her research, she is currently working on literary depictions of East European Jewish immigrants’ experiences in German speaking lands in the 1920s. Her project focuses on the reoccurring motif of the double in Yiddish and German language fictional texts from this period. The working title for her project is “Identity in Crisis: Depictions of Jewish European Immigrants in German and Yiddish Literature.” Most recently she presented on her initial findings at the international summer school “Negotiating Europe. Jewish and Non-Jewish Spaces,” held in July of 2008 at the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, Germany.
Andrew Demshuk is a PhD candidate in the Department of History. Since completing a master's degree in history at Marquette University in Spring 2005, he has been engaging in doctoral work at 
the University of Illinois with a focus on post-World War II German-Polish interchange. In the Summer of 2006, he was a research fellow at the Simon-Dubnow-Institute for Jewish History and Culture at the University of Leipzig. From August 2007 through August 2008, he pursued dissertation research in Germany through a fellowship from the Herder Institut in Marburg and the German Academic Exchange Program (DAAD). Andrew’s dissertation examines how, amid the charged political context of the early Cold War, Germans expelled from the province of Silesia after World War II dealt with the loss of their homeland. It explores how they privately remembered the loss, how they commemorated the loss in gatherings, and how they traveled back to these spaces. It arguesthat recognizing the destruction and foreignness present in former homeland spaces and cherishing idealized memories that did not concur within these spaces encouraged many expellees to recognize that physical return was not possible.
Margaret Ewing is a PhD Candidate in Art History, focusing on art of the twentieth century and beyond. Currently in the early 
stages of dissertation research, she is investigating public art made in Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Broader research interests include the arts of memory, identity, and Holocaust representation. She has held internships at the Whitney Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Hirshhorn Museum, among others, and plans to pursue curatorial work upon the completion of her studies. She is also a regular contributor of art criticism to Artforum.com. She earned her B.A. in history at Oberlin College and her M.A. in art history at the University of Illinois.
Jack J. Hutchens is a graduate student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
at Illinois. His research interests include contemporary Polish and Czech literature, queer theory, and popular culture. A particular interest is the work of Polish-Jewish author Julian Stryjkowski. Jack has recently published an article in the Journal of Popular Culture, "Translating the Queer Voice: Problems with Polish Translations of Ginsberg's 'America' and 'Message.'" He also operates a small press, Modern Barbarian Press, through which he has self published a textbook, A (very) Short Introduction to Beginning Polish Grammar. He tries his best to split his time between central Europe and the U.S.
Elana Jakel is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History, focusing on the history of the Soviet Union. She recently completed over ten months of dissertation research in Russia and Ukraine with the support of fellowships from IREX and Fulbright. Her dissertation will examine the experiences of Jews in
Soviet Ukraine immediately after the Holocaust and, in particular, how interactions between Jews and non-Jews shaped these experiences. Issues of nationalism and belonging, anti-Semitism, and Holocaust memory will be prominent in her dissertation.
Regine Kroh, originally from Germany, came to the University of Illinois in 2006 after receiving her M.A. from the University of Kansas. Her M.A. thesis was concerned with the depiction of outsiders in the short stories of Klaus Mann. Her research focuses on the concepts of identity and belonging and their connection to memory. She will explore these ideas also in her dissertation project which will deal with post-'89 literature by former East-German authors. In addition, Regine is interested in Jewish life and culture, exile literature, Holocaust representation, literary depiction of space as well as the usage of photography in literature.
Eric McKinley entered the Ph.D. program in History at Illinois in 2008 after recieving a B.A. and M.A.
in history from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. His focus is on modern German intellectual and cultural history. Eric is interested in the multifarious definitions of “Germanness” that have manifested in history, and how these German identities are reconciled with other ways of perceiving the self. Specifically, he is interested in German Jewish exiles in the nineteenth century, and how a sense of homelessness contributed to the development of the idea of Germany that preceded political unification. His other research interests include the ontology and reification of a European identity and European cosmopolitanism.
Zia Miric is a PhD student in the English Department. Her field of specialization encompasses British literature in the long nineteenth century, while her research interests focus on Anglo-Jewish literature and culture, proto-Zionism and Zionism, nationalism, religion and secularization, and inflections of gender with ethnicity and race. Currently in the early stages of her dissertation work, she examines the tensions between theoretical concepts and practical realities of nationality and citizenship for nineteenth-century Anglo-Jews, and their negotiation in cultural and literary discourse in terms of race, ethnicity, nation and religion. Zia completed her undergraduate degree in English at the University of Belgrade in Serbia. She obtained an MPhil in English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, where she worked on the cognitive stylistics and narratology of modernist and existentialist fictional texts.
Alaina Pincus is working on a PhD in early modern Jewish and Literary studies in the English Department. Her dissertation
explores literary constructions of the interconnectedness of non-Jewish representations of Jews and Jewish self-representation in early modern British and colonial culture. Her work puts Jewish self-representation, the process of building a distinctly Jewish-British identity, into dialogue with other forms of cultural representation in order to identify the ways in which 
contrasting forms of Jewishness become legible through cultural and textual signifiers.
Giuseppe Prigiotti is a master's student in the Italian Literature/Cultural Studies Program in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese and a teaching assistant for Italian language. His research focuses on the intersection of culture, media, and religion. He is currently working on the web representation of Jewish Italian Communities, and the place of the Bible in the Web. He founded and led in Catania, Sicily, his home town, the local group of SAE (Secretary for Ecumenical Activities), an Italian organization actively involved in ecumenical and interfaith dialogue. For eight years he was a Catholic Religion teacher in public high schools. In Italy he earned a B.A in Theology (Studio Teologico Fiorentino, Firenze) and a B.A in Philosophy (Università degli Studi di Catania). He also pursued an M.A. in the area of Human Resource Education (Università degli Studi Roma Tre) another in Religious Pedagogy (Università Pontificia Salesiana, Roma), a certificate in Online Learning Education (Università degli Studi Ca' Foscari, Venezia), and a Diploma in (Reformed) Theology (Facoltà Valdese di Teologia, Roma).
Jason Ritchie is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology. Jason’s research focuses on the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Palestinians who live in or travel to 
Israel. The project is part of a broader interest in the relationship between sexuality and race in ostensibly democratic nation-states at the historical convergence of neoliberal capitalism and “clash of civilizations” discourses. These two phenomena have simultaneously facilitated the normalization of certain models of homosexuality and the increasing marginalization of racialized—especially Arab—others. In this sense, Israel-Palestine, with all its cultural and historical particularities, is a microcosm of wider processes that characterize much of the world today. With support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Social Science Research Council, and the Lady Davis Fellowship Trust, Jason will complete 18 months of dissertation research in Israel-Palestine in December 2008.
Nicolle Rivera is a first year student in the Doctoral Program in History at Illinois. She is
currently interested in performativity in everyday life in 13th and 14th century France. She is especially interested in researching how the habits of everyday life informed the construction of identity in medieval society. Her scholarly interests also include other medieval perceptions of identity, the experience of marginalized groups, and the complicated relationship between Christians and Jews as revealed through folklore and popular culture. Nicolle holds a a B.A. from Northwestern University.
Dmitry Tartakovsky is completing his dissertation in the Department of History at the University of Illinois. The thesis is titled “Parallel Ruptures: Dniester Jews between Romanian Nationalism and Soviet Communism, 1918-1940.” He is interested in modern Jewish, Russian, and Balkan history, particularly the confrontation of Jewish identity with modern states in Eastern Europe between the wars. He is also working on questions of Holocaust memory in former communist countries and recently published an article on this subject in East European Jewish Affairs. He has taught several history courses at Illinois, including classes on modern Europe, Russia, modern Jewish history, and World History from 1900-1950. Dmitry was born in Soviet Ukraine. He worked as a political analyst for the State Department from 2000-2002. His wife Elena is a folk singer, and his son Alex recently turned one.