Andrew Carroll is the director of the Legacy War Letters
Project that will making a home at Chapman this spring. Launched on November
11, 1998, the Legacy Project is a national, all-volunteer initiative that
encourages Americans to honor and remember those who have served—or are
currently serving—this nation in wartime by seeking out and preserving their
letters and e-mails home. These collections will serve as valuable war and
society resources for the Chapman community.
Edward Day - As a criminologist, my primary interest is studying
perpetrators and victims of violations of international criminal and
humanitarian law. On the perpetrator side, I have been exploring the
application of criminological theories to the behavior of genocidaires. And the
victim side, I am interested in exploring what actions and structures lead to
perceptions of justice in the wake of such tragedies.
Lynda Hall - My work looks at traumatic memory from a literary
perspective. My research and teaching lately has been exploring the ways
that traumatic memory, especially that memory that comes from terror, is
reflected and filtered through literature, particularly fiction. I have
focused on American slavery, the French Revolution, the Holocaust, the
Argentinian Dirty War, and the recent fiction that has been “inspired” by the
events of 9/11/01. Some of this work includes the writings of Slavov
Zizek, Jacques Derrida, Cathy Caruth, and Shoshana Felman. My interest in
this comes from an overlap in my research on the rise of the English Gothic
novel of the 1790s as a response to the English unease with the French Revolution
and the Reign of Terror. Because of the overwhelming use of the word,
“terrorism” in the past decade, some of the recent fiction inspired by 9/11 is
also fascinating. Not all of this is “war” per se, but it is always in
response to violence and terror.
Marilyn Harran - My research focuses particularly
on Holocaust memory and the means by which memory is conveyed through oral and
written histories. I am currently writing/editing two Holocaust
memoirs. I continue to be especially interested in the transition period,
specifically the election of 1930, in which the Nazis came to become a major
political force within Germany, and the ways in which the Nazis deemphasized
some aspects of their ideology and emphasized others in order to appeal to many
different social groups. And finally, I hope to write a major
interpretive study of Holocaust and memory developing themes that have emerged
through the accounts of the many survivors I have come to know well over the
last 20 years.
Jennifer Keene - My research focuses on World War
I. I am an American history by training, and have authored several books on the
American experience during the war. I am presently working on studies of the
African American soldier experience and a general overview of the American war
experience that examines the war as a global, not just national, event. I am interested in how competing memories of
war underlie veteran political agendas in the postwar period, and also how
visual materials create narratives that allow Americans to discuss and dispute
the social changes engendered by war.
Angie Kanavou -Currently, my Cambodian
collaborator and friend Kosal Path and I work on post war/genocide social
adaptation. Two projects are growing out of this theme. The first
deals with perpetrators and survivors and compares the two groups along the
continuum of social adaptation. It asks questions such as: How does each
group view the past, relates to "the other," the broader society and
the state? The second group deals with the children of each group.
As with the first, the second project compares groups of young adults along the
adaptation continuum but we try to get deeper into community participation and
extent of empathic responses. Do parents experiences as perpetrators,
survivors (and bystanders) affect how their off-spring relate to the
world? Our observations rely on survey analysis and content analysis of
memory transmission from one generation to the other in order to disentangle
the politics of each group's memory patterns.
Shira Klein - My
areas of expertise are Italian Jewish history, Jewish migration history, Jewish
daily life, and twentieth-century contacts between European, Israeli, and
American Jews. My
dissertation, which I defended several months ago at New York University, is a
social and cultural history of Italian Jewry and its diaspora. It spans Italy,
the United States, and Israel, and stretches from the nineteenth century until
after the Holocaust. Most accounts of modern Italian Jewry talk of an
“assimilated” population which gave up its Jewish identity. I challenge this
assumption by examining Italian Jews from their perspective, using
sources such as family letters, diaries, memoirs, oral histories, newsletters,
and institutional correspondence. These sources show that in the wake of
emancipation, Italian Jews cultivated a strong sense of Italianness and
Jewishness at one and the same time. More importantly for the War and Society
CRASSH Group, I also counter the notion that World War II represented a point
of complete and utter rupture in Italian Jewish life. By looking at Italian
Jews who lived to see the end of World War II, namely, refugees who fled Europe
before deportations began, and survivors who escaped deportation, I show that
Italian Jews experienced continuity as well as change. Both as refugee émigrés
abroad and as survivors in Italy, Italian Jews retained many of their prewar
practices and identifications. Those who fled Italy’s 1938 racial laws clung to
their past as they rebuilt their lives in Palestine (later Israel) and the
United States. Conversely, Jews from Israel and the United States, when
arriving in late 1940s Italy, encountered a Jewish community intent on
returning to the way things had been before the war. My immediate goal for the
near future is to convert my dissertation into a manuscript, and I have
identified potential publishers for this purpose.
Jeff Koerber is the first Research Associate and
Holocaust History Fellow to join the History Department at Chapman University. He
teaches courses in Holocaust history, including “The Holocaust in History and Film,” and “Perpetrators, Witnesses, and Rescuers.” In
addition to teaching, he contributes to the multi-faceted outreach programs of
the Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education. Mr. Koerber is a doctoral candidate
in Holocaust history at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. His
dissertation, “Born in the Borderlands: Jewish Youth and Their Response to
Oppression and Genocide, 1933–1948,” explores and analyzes the prewar and
wartime experience of young Jews raised under the contrasting political and
social orders of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Second
Republic of Poland. He has received Fulbright grants for research in Belarus
and Poland, as well as fellowships from Claims Conference, USC Shoah Foundation
Institute, Holocaust Educational Foundation, and Tauber Institute for the Study
of European Jewry. His background is interdisciplinary: he holds Bachelors and
Masters degrees in Architecture from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, and practiced historic preservation architecture in Chicago
for a decade and a half.
Rafael Luevano - In his work, Woman-Killing
in Juárez: Theodicy at the Border, theologian Rafael Luévano pondered the
brutal killing, which began in 1993, of more than 500 innocent women on the
northern border of Mexico. These women-killings are related to the escalating
bloodbath of the illegal drug trade. In his current work, Luévano shifts his
attention to this narco-violence. This complex and modern war rages at the
southern border of the United States, where vying drug cartels battle against
one another and corrupt police officers and army soldiers supposedly protect
Mexico’s interests. In the last six years, there have been more than 6,000
casualties of this drug war, approximately the same number as the number of
American soldiers lost in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. No one is safe from
random violence. Luévano employs field research, social analysis, and
theological reflection, crafting his research into personal accounts called narrative theology. In his reflections,
he attempts to make some sense of evil and human suffering. He focuses on
memory of the dead as a possible step toward change, though amid this senseless
violence—ultimately—the mercy of God becomes the reservoir of hope and healing.
Robert Slayton - My research interests are somewhat eclectic. I write quite a bit
in urban history, but I have also dealt with military history in three ways:
--my biography of an Air Force general, William Tunner, who was the
great pioneer in military air transport: Master of the Air.
--this summer I will just be
starting a new book about the history of the Independent Living movement among
the disabled, including a number of projects for veterans of WW I and WWII.
--Arms of Destruction.
The original title of this was “The best land weapons of WW II, ranking
different weapon systems, etc. Before the marketing guys had their way.
Stephanie Takaragawa - My research focuses on the Japanese-American internment,
emphasizing the role that event played in the construction of collective memory
and community of Japanese-American identity in the US today. This is analyzed through the
Japanese-American National Museum in Los Angeles, and the shift in media
representations of Japanese-Americans in the US from WWII to the present. My research also looks at the economic role
in the “evacuation and relocation” of this community who was forced to discard
their possessions and property.
Don Will - My interest in War, Memory and
Society, addresses how examining these issues can prevent future
wars. For over 25 years I have taught Peace Studies at
Chapman University. The curriculum in the Peace Studies major examines
the fundamental causes of conflict, the issue of positive vs. negative peace,
and the analysis of specific wars so as to better understand their causes and
prevention. Marx wrote that “the tradition of all dead
generations weighs like a nightmare upon the brain of the living.”
History can fuel the flames of organic nationalism or it can temper the
temptation to repeat the errors of the past. The study of war
and peace inherently demands an interdisciplinary approach. In my
past work as a UN nongovernmental observer, I engaged both the anti-apartheid
movement and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as both a scholar and an
activist. I continue to conduct research on how the resolution of the
former case can mitigate the intransigence of the latter case.
John Hall, Professor of Law, areas of interest are WW1,
Napoleonic Wars, and the Cambodian genocide
Tom Zoellner - I
am a nonfiction writer whose work frequently touches on the causes and the
effects of war. I have written and co-written two books about regional African
conflicts. An Ordinary Man was
co-written with real-life Hotel
Rwanda figure Paul Rusesabagina. The
Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit and Desire documented
the large-scale smuggling of diamonds that financed three civil wars in Africa.
In addition, my book Uranium:
War, Energy and the Rock That Shaped the World told the
centuries-long story of the seed mineral of atomic weapons, and covered
the Manhattan Project, as well as the buildup to the Iraq War and the efforts
of the International Atomic Energy Agency to stop the clandestine
enrichment of uranium in Iran, North Korea, Libya and other nations. A
forthcoming book Train: A
Biography has a chapter on the role of the railroad in combat,
a legacy that dates to the Crimean War.
War and Society scholars expand the study of warfare
beyond its military, diplomatic, and political dimensions by examining the
social and cultural aspects of how societies go to war, experience war, and its
consequences. This group will bring together
faculty and resources from the Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education, the Earl
Babbie Center, and the War Letters Legacy Project to examine issues related to
war, society, and memory.