Dr. Yurii Kaparulin is a historian and legal scholar who studies Eastern Europe's history and law, with particular interests in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Human Rights, and International Сrimes.He is the author of the book Oleksandr Riabinin-Skliarevskyi (1878-1942): An Intellectual Biography of a Historian that reveals the background of the late Russian Empire, the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-1921, and Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s through the life of a repressed military officer and historian. His second current book project is titled Between Soviet Modernization and the Holocaust: Jewish Agrarian Settlements in Southern Ukraine (1924-1948). His research has been published in The Ideology and Politics Journal; Colloquia Humanistica; Holocaust Studies: A Ukrainian Focus; City History, Culture, Society; Eastern Europe Holocaust Studies; and Ukraina Moderna. Dr. Kaparulin is co-author of two documentary film projects, Kalinindorf (2020) and UnKnown Holocaust (2021-ongoing).
Dr. Stephanie Kraver is a scholar of modern Arabic and Hebrew literature who specializes in transcultural exchange, expressions of mourning, trauma theory, and translation. She places Palestinian poetry into conversation with Hebrew and Anglophone works, exploring literary relationships across national borders and poetic traditions. Developing new approaches to understanding literature’s relationship to cultural contexts and history, her current project, Reading Past Difference: Palestinian/Israeli Poetics of Performance and Desire, challenges the linguistic and sociopolitical cleavages that characterize Arab/Jewish writing and identity politics. Her manuscript explicates the archive of two poets: the celebrated Palestinian author Mahmoud Darwish and the renowned Israeli writer Dahlia Ravikovitch. Kraver has contributed to the Journal of Arabic Literature, Penn State University Press, and Cultural Critique.
Dr. Elliot Ratzman is a social ethicist working at the intersection of religious studies, political theory, and community organizing. At the Wallenberg Institute, he will be completing his first book, Zipporah’s Knife: A Jewish Reckoning with Race, which examines the dynamic of antisemitism and antiracism after 1967 in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East. Ratzman is also researching the theology and networks of American Jewish pacifists after the rise of Nazism, considering theoretical approaches to ‘resistance’ and rescue, acquiring materials on modern moral perfectionism and spiritual disciplines, and exploring testimonies of the self in extreme situations: as hostage, prisoner, convert, organizer. Most of his interests originate in the problem of bystanders and rescue, and the strategies and tactics that moderns have developed to coordinate moral commitment with practical action. Ratzman is also involved with interreligious efforts for Middle East peace, racial justice, anti-militarism, immigrant dignity, and health care equity. He is a board member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Extend Programs: Educating for Justice in Israel/Palestine, and the Jewish Peace Fellowship.
Dr. Aaron Rock-Singer is a historian of the modern Middle East with a particular focus on the relationship between religion and politics. His areas of research include Islamic movements (particularly Islamism and Salafism), Islamic law, social practice, media, and Mandate Palestine. His first book, Practicing Islam in Egypt: Print Media and the Islamic Revival was published by Cambridge University Press (2019) and traced the emergence of a broad religious revival in 1970s Egypt. His second monograph, In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the 20th-Century Middle East (University of California Press, 2022), charted the rise of Islam’s fastest growing revivalist movement across the Middle East from 1926 to 1995 with a particular focus on social practice. He is currently at work on a third monograph, tentatively entitled Worshiping the Nation: Exclusivist Politics in Mandatory Palestine, 1927-48, which draws on Arabic and Hebrew-language sources to trace the linked emergence of Islamic and Jewish religio-political visions under the British Mandate. Dr. Rock-Singer’s writing has also been published by Aeon, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Oxford Analytica.
Dr. Anoush Tamar Suni is a sociocultural anthropologist who studies political violence and the aftermath of genocide; the politics of history and memory; ruins, landscape, and cultural heritage; and religious and ethnic minority communities in the Middle East. At the Wallenberg Institute, she will be completing her first book, Memory in Ruins: Politics of History and the Afterlives of Genocide in Anatolia. Based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Turkey, this book traces the interconnected pasts and presents of Muslim Kurdish and Christian Armenian communities with a focus on state violence, local memory, and the material landscape of ruins. Dr. Suni is also at work on a second ethnographic project—Imagining the Underground: Violence, Value, and Enchanted Treasure—which explores the hunt for mythical buried Armenian gold as a material interaction with a history of genocide and displacement in the context of a violent present. Dr. Suni’s research has been published in the journals Comparative Studies in Society and History, Anthropological Quarterly, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies.
