Ethan Madarieta received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with a graduate minor in Latina/Latino Studies and certificate in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. His dissertation, “The Practice of Memory: Decolonial Resistance in Indigenous Chile and the Chilean Diaspora,” is a study of contemporary trans-American memory and memorial performance as generating space for knowing and...

HGMS is delighted to announce that Comparative Literature and HGMS graduate student Alexandra van Doren defended her dissertation on April 30 and was hooded as an Illini Ph.D. on 11 May 2019. Her dissertation, which she will deposit in August, ‘“Where foot knocks against/the unburied bones of kin’: Topographies of Memory and Amnesia in Poland and Spain,” compares the memory cultures of Spain and...

Joshua Altshuler graduated from the University of Illinois with a BA in History and a minor in Jewish Studies. He won the Filler Award in 2016. Currently, Joshua is an Education Fellow for the Institute of Southern Jewish Life and will be traveling to synagogues throughout the south to develop social programming...

Classics and Jewish Studies major, Aria Tsoulouhas, graduated from the University of Illinois is the spring of 2018. Aria was a winner of the Filler Award in 2017. She will be attending Yale Divinity School this fall to study Second-Temple Judaism.

Jewish Studies minor, Payton Heyen, graduated from the University of Illinois in the spring of 2018 with a BA in History. She was a winner of the Filler Award in 2017. Payton is currently at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis pursuing her Juris Doctorate Degree. 

Elana Jakel is Program Manager of the Initiative for the Study of Ukrainian Jewry at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). She received her doctorate in Russian and Soviet History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a dissertation entitled “‘Ukraine without Jews’? Nationality...

Jessica Young is currently an Assistant Professor of Global English at New College of Florida. Her dissertation, “Migrating Memories: Power and Transcultural Memory in Contemporary South Asian Fiction,” traces the visible and invisible modes of memory transmission across national and cultural borders in South Asian literature produced in the United States, England, Canada, and the subcontinent....

Hapsatou Wane is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Southern University-Armstrong Campus in the Department of Literature. Her research centers on Francophone and Anglophone African and Afro-Brazilian literature, gender and women studies, postcolonialism, indigenous critical theory autobiographies and memory...

Priscilla Charrat Nelson is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of French and Arabic at Bradley University. She obtained her PhD in French Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in August 2017, where she defended her dissertation "Documents et Cheminements: Tracing the Postmemory of the Second World War and the Algerian War of Independence." During her time at UIUC...

Dmitry Tartakovsky completed his PhD in history in 2009. After working as Attaché/Vice Consul for the State Department, Balkans analyst for Army Special Forces, and the UIUC Library’s Slavic Reference Service, he is currently Managing Editor for the Slavic Review.