The UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies invites graduate students to apply for Roter research travel grants for the summer. The Roter grants are intended to defray costs associated with short-term research or study in the field of Jewish studies. Awards will be made up to $2,500.
The Roter research fund was established by UCLA Professor Emerita Ellen Dirksen in honor of her parents, Chaskel and Sara Roter.
Applications for the 2020-2021 academic year will be coming soon.
2017-2018 Recipients
Yael Assor [Anthropology] traveled to Israel to do research on how Jewish ethics shape Israel’s healthcare policy by conducting interviews and archival research at the Israel National Archive.
Nadia Ben-Marzouk [NELC] traveled to Israel to supervise a portion (Square D18) of the archaeological excavations at Tel Dan as a member of the new Turning Points project, a collaboration between UCLA and Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, in order to collect data to study the identities of the site’s inhabitants during the early Iron Age.
Julie Botnick [Info. Studies] created a participatory digital community archive in partnership with the Los Angeles Sephardic community to present at the Association of Jewish Libraries conference.
Michael Casper [History] conducted critical archival dissertation research in Israel on key Jewish political activists by visiting various archives such as the Archive of the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel in Tel Aviv, the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and the Dov Levin Collection at Hebrew University.
Jacob Damm [NELC] traveled to the archaeological site of Tel Dan to join the Turning Points expedition studying the transition between the Late Bronze Age and Iron IA (c. 1550-1100 BCE).
Maxwell Greenberg [Chicana/o Studies] attended the Latin American Jewish Studies Fifth Regional Conference in New York City where he co-organized a roundtable on “Racial Formation in the Latin American Jewish Context.” In addition, the grant funded his travel to the 2018 Biennial Scholars’ Conference on American Jewish History in Philadelphia during which he participated in a roundtable on “Disruptive Paradigms: Jews and the Post-Multicultural Matrix of Southern California and Beyond.”
Timothy Hogue [NELC] traveled to Ascona, Switzerland to present a paper on the history of the “I am” formula, most famously know from the Hebrew Bible but also attested in Syro-Anatolian and Levantine monumental inscriptions.
Paul Kurek [Germanic Languages] is examining the so called heavy load-bearing cylinder Schwerbelastungskörper. By visiting several archives and the ruin itself, Kurek wants to shed light on the overlooked symbolic significance of this probably last remnant of the planned radical transformation of Berlin into Germania. This study will be the first of its kind on this particular unique structure.
Christopher PreJean [NELC] traveled to Bochum, Germany to present research on Christian-Jewish social history and attend a 10-day course entitled “Jews and Christians between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean: Coexistence and Conflict 600-1800 CE” to show how Jews and Christians interacted and were viewed while living under Islamic rule.
Benjamin Ratskoff [Comp. Lit.] traveled to Berlin, Germany to attend the Leo Baeck Summer University for a two-week course on “Jewish Studies and Gender Research” that focuses on developing the theoretical approaches of Gender Studies within the field of Jewish Studies, centering interdisciplinary research projects and methodologies.
Megan Remington [NELC] traveled to Krakow, Poland to present a conference paper at the European Association for Jewish Studies on Jewish-Roman identity in 3rd Century Rome.
Simone Salmon [Ethnomusicology] traveled to Essaouira, Morocco to present her paper, titled “Nostalgia for a Life Unlived: Diasporic Memory through Sephardic Folksong,” to the International Council for Traditional Music’s Mediterranean Studies symposium.
Jessie Stoolman [Anthropology] traveled to Israel to study Hebrew in an intensive program which will enable her graduate research project on Moroccan Jewish communities living under Spanish colonialism.