Leo Franks is a British Ph.D. student in History with a Designated Emphasis in Jewish Studies. His research interests orbit Jewish legal history.
Franks has taught Jewish history at Berkeley, most recently as a Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) for the course "History of the Holocaust." In 2025, the Center for Jewish Studies awarded him the Goor Prize for his essay, The anti-history of anti- antisemitism: Fred Kormis’ Holocaust Sculpture. Franks previously receieved an M.Phil. in Modern European History from St. Catharine’s College at the University of Cambridge; his...
Molly Krueger is a PhD candidate in the Department of German with a Designated Emphasis in Jewish Studies. She received her MA from UC Berkeley in 2019 and her BA in German from Bowdoin College in 2013. She is currently at work on a dissertation that focuses on questions of history, memory, temporality, and literary form in contemporary German-Jewish writing.
David Kurkovskiy is a PhD student in Slavic Languages and Literatures with a Designated Emphasis in Jewish Studies. He works chiefly between five languages: Belarusian, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and Yiddish, focusing on Yiddish, Polish and West Ruthenian philology since the early modern period, as well as on the cosmopolitan literature and letters of Belarusians and Belarusian Jews between Vilnius and Minsk in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. David earned his BA from Yale University in 2017, where he double-majored in Russian and Eastern European...
Michael (Misha) Lerner is a graduate student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. His main areas of interests include: Jewish participation in Russian revolutionary movements, revolutionary autobiography in Russian and Yiddish, and Modern Yiddish Literature.
Nathan Levine is a PhD student in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies, with a designated emphasis in Jewish Studies. He is interested in the history of Greco-Roman and Jewish interpretive traditions, with a focus on Byzantine Homeric studies.
Shirelle is a doctoral candidate in Middle Eastern Language and Cultures, with designated emphases in Film & Media Studies and Jewish Studies. Her current research examines modern Hebrew and Yiddish literary and visual cultures, focusing on their role in mediating changing ideals and norms surrounding gender, love, marriage, sex, and sexuality from the late 19th century through the 1930s.
Liza Michaeli is a PhD student in Rhetoric, with Designated Emphases in Critical Theory and Jewish Studies. She works in poetics, psychoanalysis, embodied theology, pathophysiology, phenomenology, and Jewish ethics.
Sloane Nilsen is a PhD student in the History Department pursuing a specialization in modern German and German-Jewish cultural history. His dissertation will examine the ways in which the Nazi regime relied upon natural darkness – the nighttime – to consolidate power in Berlin between 1933 and 1939. It will simultaneously explore Jewish and queer nocturnal subcultures that were maintained or developed in the city during the period.
He holds an MA in History and Literature from Columbia University (2019), an MLitt in Transnational, Global, and Spatial History from the University of...
