Faculty and Staff

Historian and sociologist Taner Akçam received his doctorate in 1995 from the University of Hanover, with a dissertation on The Turkish National Movement and the Armenian Genocide Against the Background of the Military Tribunals in Istanbul Between 1919 and 1922.

Debórah Dwork is Senior Research Scholar at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. She was inaugural Rose Professor of Holocaust History (September 1996 to August 2018) and Founding Director of the Strassler Center. Dwork is a leading authority on university education in this field, as well as her area of scholarly expertise: Holocaust history.

One of the first historians to record Holocaust survivors’ oral histories and to use their narratives as a scholarly source, Dwork explores the social and cultural history of the Holocaust. Among her books, Flight from the Reich: Jewish Refugees, 1933-1946 opened the geographic view of the Holocaust and integrated the refugee experience into its history; Children With A Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe introduced a child-centered approach to historical investigation and Auschwitz, 1270 to the Present received the Spiro Kostoff Award, the National Jewish Book Award and was voted a Best Book by the German Book Critics. She has been, inter alia, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies.

Associate Professor of International Development and Social Change Refugees and forced migrants, especially refugees in urban areas in the Middle East and Africa; population displacement and mobility; gender, diaspora, and citizenship; anthropology of ethnicity and race; transnational Islam; Arab League states’ immigration and naturalisation policies; music and migration; Muslim Arab Sudanese diaspora.

Dr. Fox’s main scholarly focus is the rhetoric and internal coherence of the Hebrew Bible, and how they may be brought out in translation. He is also interested in how the Bible has been transformed at each stage by generations of Israelites, Jews, and Christians. He teaches courses in which texts serve as windows to the attitudes and concerns of Jews through the ages. Dr. Fox’s activities in translation have led him to some unexpected places. He was a religious consultant on the animated film Prince of Egypt, and has been collaborating with an American-Israeli artist, Schwebel, who sets the David stories against the backdrop of 1980s Jerusalem.

Professor Imber is a modern Jewish historian, with a particular interest in the cultural and political dimensions and intersections of Jewish history and European imperial history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her research focuses on the history of Zionism and Jewish nationalism; investigating and theorizing non-Zionism; Mandate Palestine; Jewish and Zionist conceptions of the “state”; and the relationship between socialism and imperialism. More broadly, she is interested in how everyday practices, personal and affective ties, and spaces of private and convivial interaction shape political experience. Professor Imber offers courses in Jewish history, British imperial history, and the history of modern Israel.

Dr. Kühne teaches Modern European and German History. His academic and research work is concerned with the relation of war, genocide, and society, with long-term traditions of political culture of Central Europe, above all with the problem of locating the Holocaust and Nazi Germany in the social and cultural history of the 20th century.

States and state-effects, political violence, extractive industries, displacement and irregular migration, critical humanitarianism, (late and post-) socialism, legal regimes, science and technology studies, and comparative cartographies in Mainland Southeast Asia and the Greater South China Sea

Dr. Sperling teaches a variety of courses in comparative politics, including Russian politics; revolution and political violence; mass murder and genocide under communism; transitions to democracy; globalization and democracy; and introduction to women’s studies. Her research interests include globalization and accountability, social movements, gender politics, patriotism and militarism, and state-building in the post-communist region.

Sperling’s most recent book, Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia (Oxford University Press) won the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) Davis Center Book Prize for the “outstanding monograph on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology or geography,” as well as the Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS) Heldt Prize for the “Best book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women’s Studies.” Sex, Politics and Putin was also included in Top 10 books on Russia for 2014.

Professor Szekely’s research focuses on the foreign and domestic policies of nonstate armed groups in the Middle East, including Hamas, Hizbullah, the PLO, the PKK, and others. Her work is based on field research conducted across the Middle East. She teaches courses on comparative politics with a focus on the Middle East, including Introduction to Comparative Politics, the Politics of the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli Conflict, the Politics of Ethnicity and Identity, and capstone seminars on civil war and forced migration. She is also affiliated with the programs in Peace Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies.

Dr. Tanzer received her PhD in History at Brown University in 2018. Her research focuses on minorities, art, and nationalism in Central Europe. Her current project, “Vanishing Vienna,” explores representations of Jewish absence in post-Nazi Vienna and Austria. More broadly, her research interests include Central European Jewish history, migration, and the construction of national and European cultural identities. She has received awards from the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, the Central European History Society, the Getty Research Institute, the German Historical Institute, and the Holocaust Educational Foundation at Northwestern University. In 2017-2018 she was the Dr. Sophie Bookhalter Fellow in Jewish Culture at the Center for Jewish History in New York and in 2016-2017 she was a Graduate Fellow at the Cogut Institute for Humanities at Brown University.

American Jewish Studies, race and ethnicity, social stratification, comparative genocide, gender.

Dr. Tobin specializes in the culture and literature of the German-speaking world from the Age of Goethe to the present, with a special focus on gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, and human rights. He teaches courses on gay and lesbian studies and queer theory, human rights and literature, and Freud, as well as more traditional topics such as German film and Faust. He is also usually one of the co-professors of the National Imagination course. In the spring of 2013, he was the Fulbright Freud Visiting Scholar of Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Museum and the Universitat Wien in Vienna. He directs the major in Comparative Literature and advises students who want to self-design a major in German Studies.

Group-based victimization; inclusive and exclusive victim consciousness; acknowledgment; prosocial behavior between groups (especially between minority and victim groups); psychology of genocide.

Director, women’s and gender studies; International relations theory, arms control and international security, nationalism and ethnic politics, U.S. foreign policy, women, gender and conflict.

Thomas Kühne, Director
Cohen-Lasry House
Tel: 1-508-793-7523
Email: tkuehne@clarku.edu

Mary Jane Rein, Executive Director
Cohen-Lasry House
Tel: 1-508-421-3745
Email: mrein@clarku.edu

Kim Vance, Budget Coordinator
Cohen-Lasry House
Tel: 1-508-421-3774
Email: kvance@clarku.edu

Robyn Conroy, Program Manager and Rose Librarian
Cohen-Lasry House
Tel: 1-508-793-7764
Email: rconroy@clarku.edu

Alissa Duke, Administrative Assistant
Cohen-Lasry House
Tel: 1-508-793-8897
Email: aduke@clarku.edu

Lamisa Muksitu ’22, Student Office Assistant
Lauren Dellinger ’22, Student Office Assistant