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Current Students

Jewish Studies Cluster Students

 

Noah Marcus
noahmarcus2027@u.northwestern.edu
Noah Marcus is a first-year PhD student in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama (IPTD) program. He earned both his BA in Theatre and his MA in Theatre Theory and Dramaturgy from the University of Ottawa where he wrote his thesis on the performance of Jewish rituals in real life and their performance on the theatrical stage in The Dybbuk: Or Between Two Worlds. His research interests include Jewish theatre, Jewish rituals, and the performance of identity. He is interested in not only how Jewish identity is created and performed on the stage, but also how such theatrical performances of Jewishness interact with existing Jewish identities and/or create a new sense of Jewishness at both the individual and community level. In addition to the Jewish Studies Cluster, Noah is affiliated with the Critical Studies in Theatre and Performance Cluster.

 

Molly Schiffer
mollyschiffer2027@u.northwestern.edu
Molly Schiffer is a first-year PhD student in political science studying the relationship between Jewish-American political identity and American political development. In the past, she has completed work on the Jewish Labor Bund’s diasporic movement to lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, and the impact of the diaspora on Jewish-American political coalescence. Looking forward, she hopes to complete a project on the advocacy of contemporary left-wing Jewish organizations, and their normative appeals to American Jews on the basis of identity. 

Paul Feller
paulfellergumucio2024@u.northwestern.edu
Paul Feller is a Ph.D. Student in Musicology, and a member of Northwestern’s Medieval Studies Cluster. In 2022, he started working as Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Illinois Chicago and, since 2019, has worked with Cesar Favila at UCLA, exploring the musical lives of cloistered nuns in colonial New Spain. His research primarily focuses on northern-European Jewish–Gentile musical interactions in the early-modern world and music throughout the Spanish colonies. Paul was the recipient of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music 2022 Irene Alm Memorial Prize for his work on the musical representation of Jewish masculinity, and has most recently published on the presence of opera contrafacts at the Amsterdam Grand Synagogue.

Arne Holverscheid
arneholverscheid2026@u.northwestern.edu
Arne Holverscheid is a first-year PhD student in the Political Science Department at Northwestern University. He is interested in political behavior and methodology, with a focus on political accountability, voting behavior and corruption. Arne also has an active interest in Israeli politics and, more generally, in comparative perspectives within political science. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Munich as well as an MSc in Social Research Methods from the London School of Economics. Before graduate school, he worked in financial crime prosecution and management consulting. 

Kalia Vogelman-Natan
KaliaVogelman-natan2024@u.northwestern.edu
Kalia Vogelman-Natan is a third-year PhD student in the Media, Technology, and Society program, working in the Center on Media and Human Development with Dr. Ellen Wartella. Her studies focus on the role of media in the lives of children and their parents. Kalia is particularly interested in the intersection of children, religion, and media, as well as the impact of children’s religious media on families, communities, and institutions. She holds a BA in International Relations with a minor in English Literature & Linguistics, and an MA in Communication from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Savoy Curry
SavoyCurry2025@u.northwestern.edu
Savoy Curry is a second-year PhD student in the History Department. Her studies focus on gender and sexuality during the medieval period. She is particularly interested in the relationships between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim women, and their connections to broader religious movements in Western Europe throughout the 10th-15th centuries. Prior to her studies at Northwestern, Savoy earned an Honors BA in History and Medieval Studies at Binghamton University (SUNY).

Liza Bernstein
lizasb2026@u.northwestern.edu
Liza Bernstien finished her first year of coursework while also spending the year focusing on the fourth chapter of the Talmud tractate Kiddushin. Bernstein has focused her research in this chapter on questions of lineage, masculinity, and hierarchical relationships in the Talmud. She hopes to continue this project as she begins her second year.


Emma Davis
EmmaDavis2025@u.northwestern.edu
Emma Davis is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science. She is interested in modern Jewish political thought, international relations theory, and post-colonial thought. She received an MSt in Jewish Studies from Oxford University and BA in Political Science from Vassar College.

Lev Daschko
LevDaschko2013@u.northwestern.edu
Lev Daschko is a doctoral candidate studying modern Eastern European history, with a focus on Bukowina in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. He has presented papers on Ukrainian-language press’ treatment of Jews in First World War Galicia and Bukovyna, and the impact of Jewish postcard makers on Habsburg Czernowitz. Lev is currently writing his dissertation on everyday borderland in Bukovyna, Moldavia, and Bessarabia. Topics of interest include urban history, visual studies, multiculturalism, Ukrainian-Jewish relations, and the First World War. Lev received an Honours B.A. in History and Political Science from the University of Toronto in 2010 and an M.A. in History from the University of Western Ontario in 2012.

Anastasiya Novatorskaya
Anastasiyanovatorskaya2026@u.northwestern.edu
Anastasiya Novatorskaya studies modern Eastern European history with a focus on early twentieth-century Ukrainian and Polish nationalism. She earned a BA in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College. 

Mahmure Idil Ozkan
MahmureOzkan2023@u.northwestern.edu
Idil Ozhan is a linguistic anthropology doctoral student at Northwestern University. Her dissertation project investigates the 2015 citizenship offer of Spain to Sephardic Jews, exploring language ideologies, citizenship, transnational migration, and the understandings of homeland and belonging among Turkish Sephardic Jews. Having a BA in sociology from Bogazici University, and an MA in Cultural Studies from Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey, her MA thesis dealt with the affect and temporal politics of language loss. Idil worked as TA at the Department of Sociology at Istanbul Bilgi University (2014-17). As co-founder of YATOC (The Study Group on Jewish Communities) in Istanbul Bilgi University, she co-organized a number of roundtables and academic workshops on Jewish Studies in Turkey.

Bogdan Pavlish
BogdanPavlish2022@u.northwestern.edu
Bogdan Pavlish studies early modern history of Eastern Europe with a focus on Poland, Ukraine and Russia. He is particularly interested in cultural, religious and intellectual history of the region. His current research project explores different modes of negotiating and managing religious diversity in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16-17th centuries. He earned his bachelor and master degrees in Political Science from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine and a master degree in Comparative History from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.
 
Anastasiia Simferovska
AnastasiiaSimferovska2023@u.northwestern.edu
Anastasiia Simferovska is a PhD student at the NU Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She wrote her MA thesis on Isaak Babel’s Red Cavalry (1926) focusing on the ways Babel used Judaic sacred and profane time to build his chronotope. Anastasiia is also a PhD candidate in Art History at the Lviv National  Academy of Arts, Ukraine. She wrote her art history dissertation on Jewish, Polish, Armenian, and Ukrainian portraits in the turn-of-the- century Lviv (Lwow, Lemberg), a major Austrian and Polish multi-ethnic East European city of the time. In her scholarly endeavors, Anastasiia focuses on the intersection of the visual and the verbal in 1900-1945 Eastern Europe, particularly on the multi-ethnic territories of the former Habsburg Galicia. Her interests also include Jewish art during the Holocaust, and the transformation of artists' identities in the 20 th  century with a focus on Jewish artists. Anastasiia presented the results of her research at the international conference “Shoah in Ukraine” (Sorbonne, Paris, Spring, 2017), at the EHRI seminar (Center for Urban History, Lviv, Fall, 2017), and at the TKUMA Institute for Jewish Studies (Dnipro, Ukraine, Fall, 2018).

Omri Tubi
omritubi2015@u.northwestern.edu
Omri Tubi is a doctoral candidate at the sociology department. His research focuses on the relationship between public health campaigns and state-formation. Omri's dissertation examines the contribution of American Jewish public health organizations working in Palestine and Israel and maintained by American Jewish bodies to Israeli state formation. Specifically, he focuses on issues of elite relations and models of institutional development. Omri holds a BA in sociology and anthropology and history from Bar Ilan University and an MA in sociology and anthropology from Tel Aviv University. He was a 2020-2021 recipient of a Global Impacts fellowship from Northwestern's Buffett Institute and is currently the recipient of the 2021-2022 Crown Graduate Fellowship. Omri's work appeared in the journal Theory and Society and won awards from the American Sociological Association. 

Ariel Weiner
arkweiner@gmail.com
Ariel Weiner is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literary Studies (CLS) with a home department in German, and holds a Mellon Fellowship in Jewish Studies, as well as a Doctoral Fellowship from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). She received an Honors B.A. in Classics and Religious Studies in 2015 from the University of King’s College in Halifax. Her areas of research include the work of Walter Benjamin, continental philosophy, media and communications theory, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and 20th century Jewish thought, particularly regarding questions of language, mediation, and perception.