Leo Franks is a British Ph.D. student in History with a Designated Emphasis in Jewish Studies and a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. His research interests orbit Jewish legal history.
Franks teaches Jewish and modern European history at Berkeley. In 2025, the Center for Jewish Studies awarded him the Goor Prize for an essay of his, which is to be published in Sculpture Journal, vol. 35, no. 2 (2026), under the title "Critiquing the Beheading of Britain's First Holocaust Memorial".
A selection of Franks' publications and awards is available ...
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.
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 H. Levine is a Ph.D. candidate in Classics with a designated emphasis in Jewish Studies. His dissertation, Writing, Orality, and the Jewish Bible in the History of Homeric Philology, investigates the Homeric tradition with a focus on its interactions with ancient Jewish and early Christian traditions. He teaches a wide range of courses, from Greek and Latin language to ancient philosophy, the Homeric epics, and the Hebrew Bible. His work is supported by the Diller Dissertator Fellowship.
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...
Juliette Rosenthal is a PhD student in the History department, studying Jews in the Eastern Mediterranean in the early 20th century. She is particularly interested in Jewish politics, journalism, and transnational movement.
