People

Tim Cole

University of Bristol
tim.cole@bristol.ac.uk

Tim Cole is Professor of Social History at the University of Bristol. He received his PhD in Geography from the University of Cambridge. Tim has wide ranging interests in social and environmental histories, historical geographies and digital humanities and also works within the creative economy. His core research has focused in the main on Holocaust landscapes - both historical and memory landscapes - writing books on Holocaust representation (Images of the Holocaust/Selling the Holocaust, 1999), the spatiality of ghettorization in Budapest (Holocaust City, 2003), social histories of the Hungarian Holocaust (Traces of the Holocaust, 2011) and the spatiality of survival (Holocaust Landscapes, 2016) as well as co-editing a collection of essays emerging from an interdisciplinary digital humanities project he co-led (Geographies of the Holocaust, 2015). Alongside this research, Tim has also developed interests in environmental history, being a co-editor of a study of military landscapes (Militarised Landscapes, 2010) and now working on a new book that explores social, cultural, landscape and environmental change in post-war Britain (About Britain). 
List of publications

 

Alberto Giordano

Texas State University
a.giordano@txstate.edu

Alberto Giordano is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at Texas State University in San Marcos. He holds a PhD in Geography from Syracuse University, an MA in Geography from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and a BA in Geography from the University of Padua in Italy. Before pursuing an academic career, he worked in the map publishing sector and in the GIS field as a consultant for private companies and public agencies in Italy and internationally. His most recent work has focused on the geography of the Holocaust and genocide, spatial applications of forensic anthropology, and historical GIS. He is the author of one book (in Italian) on quality control in GIS and of several publications in GIScience, historical cartography, and hazards geography. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the 2009 edition of the Goode’s World Atlas.
Resume and list of publications

 

Paul Jaskot

Duke University
paul.jaskot@duke.edu
http://www.dukewired.org/

Paul Jaskot is professor of art history in Duke University’s Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies.
He teaches courses on the history of architecture, and specialized courses on the art and architecture of modern Germany and the Holocaust as well as topics in Chicago architecture. Joining Duke in 2017, he is the Director of the Wired! Lab for Digital Art History & Visual Culture, to which he also contributes classes on topics related to the field of digital art history. Jaskot’s teaching extends from his research interests, and he has lectured on many topics related to modern German culture in particular. His specific area of research has mostly focused on the cultural history of National Socialist Germany and its postwar impact on art and architecture.  In general, his classes and his scholarly work tend to focus on the central art historical question of how art and politics intersect in the modern world. He has published a number of essays that explored the political function of architecture in the modern period, leading up to his most recent book The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right (Minnesota 2012). He has also co-authored three essays in historical GIS and the Holocaust in Geographies of the Holocaust (Indiana 2014). His current project focuses on a deep history of the German construction industry, for which he will contribute context on forced-labor construction work to the ongoing collaborative analysis of ghettos in occupied Europe led by Anne Kelly Knowles. In addition to his research, Jaskot has served as a member of the Board of Directors (2004-2011) of the College Art Association, the U.S. professional group for artists and art historians, as well as Director of the Holocaust Education Foundation’s Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Studies (2007-2013). From 2008-2010, he was the President of CAA. Prior to his appointment at Duke, Jaskot was a professor of art history at DePaul University and the inaugural Director of DePaul’s Studio CHI (Computing/Humanities Interface).
Resume and list of publications

 

Anne Knowles

University of Maine
anne.knowles@maine.edu

Historical geographer Anne Kelly Knowles is Colonel James C. McBride Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Maine, where she directs the Digital and Spatial History Lab and leads the Holocaust Ghettos Project. Since the 1990s she has been a leader in historical GIS and geovisualization for the humanities and social sciences. Anne’s books include Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History (2002), Placing History (2008), Mastering Iron (2013), and Geographies of the Holocaust (2014). She is a founding member of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative. In addition to major grants from the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities, her research garnered the American Ingenuity Award for Historical Scholarship from Smithsonian magazine (2012) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015).
Curriculum Vitae

 

Anika Walke

Washington University in St. Louis
a.walke@wustl.edu

Anika Walke is Associate Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis, with affiliations in International and Area Studies; Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies; and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Walke was educated at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, and the State University of St. Petersburg, Russia, before she completed her doctorate in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California-Santa Cruz. Anika’s research and teaching interests include World War II and Nazi genocide, migration, nationality policies, and oral history in the (former) Soviet Union and Europe. Her book, Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia (Oxford University Press, 2015), weaves together oral histories, video testimonies, and memoirs to show how the first generation of Soviet Jews experienced the Nazi genocide and how they remember it after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. A current research project is devoted to the long aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II in Belarus. 
Anika Walke has been working with the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative since 2014. She currently serves as Co-PI of “The Holocaust Ghettos Project: Reintegrating Victims and Perpetrators through Places and Events,” an NEH-funded endeavor to develop a Historical GIS of Nazi-era ghettos in Eastern Europe. 
For further information, please see Anika’s departmental website and hcommons personal page.

Waitman Wade Beorn

University of Virginia
beorn@virginia.edu
Professional Website

Waitman Wade Beorn a Lecturer in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia and a consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He received his PhD and MA in European History with a specialization in the Holocaust from the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill. He has published two monographs: Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (Harvard, 2014) and The Holocust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). Waitman was fortunate to become a member of the Holocaust Geographies Collective in 2007 as a graduate student. Collaboration with the group has deeply informed his own work and he contributed an essay to Geographies of the Holocaust (Indiana, 2015), edited by Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano. He is currently researching a monograph and digital history project focused on the Janowska concentration camp in Lviv. Waitman working with a team of scholars and students to use GIS, social network analysis, and 3D modeling to explore the Holocaust here at a variety of scales. The group’s work can be explored on its website: Visualizing the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Waitman has published in the Washington Post as well as in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Central European History, German Studies Review, among other publications. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation. Prior to teaching at the University of Virginia, Waitman was the Executive Director of the Virginia Holocaust Museum and the Blumkin Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. Waitman is a 2000 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and a veteran of the war in Iraq, 2003-2004.
Curriculum Vitae

 

Smone Gigliotti

Royal Holloway, University of London
simone.gigliotti@rhul.ac.uk

Simone Gigliotti is Senior Lecturer in Holocaust Studies in the Department of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, and Deputy Director of its Holocaust Research Institute. At Royal Holloway, she is also affiliated with the the Centre for the GeoHumanities, and the Centre for Oratory and Rhetoric. She is a Fellow of The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) (FRGS) and the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). Simone’s research focuses on spatial understandings of Jewish refugees and Holocaust victim and survivor experiences in oral, written, visual and geographical narratives, and exploring how these accounts often intersect with, and differ from, perpetrator, humanitarian and other witnessing perspectives. Two co-edited collections were published in 2020: The Wiley Companion to the Holocaust (with Hilary Earl) and The Holocaust in the 21st Century: Relevance and Challenges in the Digital Age: Lessons and Legacies, Volume XIV (with Tim Cole). She recently completed a monograph that tracks and analyzes the flight paths of Jewish refugees and displaced persons in contemporaneous newsreels, documentaries, fundraising films, and home movies: On the Trail of the Homeseeker: the Holocaust and the Cinema of the Displaced.
A StoryMap of publications and papers captures the evolving trajectories of Simone’s research interests and projects. See also her research profile at Royal Holloway, University of London.

 

Ian Gregory

Lancaster University
i.Gregory@lancaster.ac.uk

Ian Gregory is a geographer by training and has spent much of his career working applying Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to historical research, a field that has become known as Historical GIS. As a result of the growth of Digital Humanities, Ian has become particularly interested in using GIS with texts as well as the more traditional quantitative sources. This has been the subject of a number of successful grant applications including the European Research Council grant Spatial Humanities: Texts, GIS, Places project.
Resume and list of publications

 

Justus Hillebrand

University of Maine and University of Cologne
justus.hillebrand@maine.edu

Justus Hillebrand is a PhD candidate (ABD) at the University of Maine and University of Cologne, Germany. He has worked with Anne Kelly Knowles on the Ghettos Database since early 2016, including developing prototype relational database designs, testing their feasibility for mapping in GIS, writing rules for data entry, and training undergraduate research assistants on the project. His dissertation, co-supervised by Knowles, is a transatlantic knowledge history of agricultural improvement in late-nineteenth-century Germany and the United States, in which he employs GIS and other digital methods. Justus has presented several papers jointly with Knowles at international conferences, including  the American Association of Geographers and Lessons and Legacies. He has published several articles of his own research as well as an article on the construction of humanist databases based on his work on the Ghettos Database.
Resume and list of publications

 

Will Kochtitzky

University of Ottawa
will.kochtitzky@uottawa.ca

Will Kochtitzky is currently a PhD student in the Laboratory for Cryospheric Research at the University of Ottawa. He received his BS in Earth sciences from Dickinson College and MSc in Earth and climate sciences from the University of Maine. His research interests include glaciology and climate change. Will is providing weather model outputs for the holocaust geographies project to understand how weather impacted life during the Holocaust, particularly in ghettos.
Research website: https://iceandclimate.org

 

Maja Kruse

University of Maine
maja.kruse@maine.edu

Maja Kruse is an interdisciplinary PhD candidate at the University of Maine and a research assistant on the Holocaust Ghettos Project. She has an MA in German Studies from the University of Southern Denmark and Geography and Geoinformatics from the University of Copenhagen. In Denmark, her work has mostly concerned the German occupation of Denmark and the resistance fight, the deportation and flight of the Danish Jews, and Himmler’s racial association, Lebensborn, and its activities in Denmark.
Her interdisciplinary dissertation supervised by Anne Knowles will deal with natural elements and landscapes of the Holocaust as experienced by perpetrators and victims using GIS and survivor testimonies. Maja is also an indexer of Holocaust survivor testimonies for the USC Shoah Foundation.
Curriculum Vitae

 

Maël Le Noc

Texas State University
mael.lenoc@txstate.edu

Maël Le Noc is a PhD student in Geography at Texas State University working under the supervision of Alberto Giordano. He grew up in France and received his master’s degree in Geography from Texas State University in May 2016. His research focuses on spatial aspects of the Holocaust and his dissertation examines the effect of anti-Jewish persecution on the everyday geography of two Parisian districts, using survivor’s testimonies, archival records, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies. He also cooperates with the collective "Connus à cette adresse" which investigates the question of housing in Paris during the Occupation period. He has been awarded fellowships from the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Studies, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, the Holocaust Educational Foundation and the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society.
Resume and list of publications

 

Paul Rayson

Lancaster University
p.rayson@lancaster.ac.uk

Paul Rayson is director of the UCREL research centre and a Reader in the School of Computing and Communications, in the Infolab21 building at Lancaster University in Lancaster, UK. A long term focus of his work is the application of semantic-based natural language processing in extreme circumstances where language is noisy (e.g. in historical, learner, speech, email, txt, and other computer-mediated communications varieties). His applied research is in the areas of dementia detection, online child protection, cyber security, learner dictionaries, and text mining of historical corpora and annual financial reports. Paul is a co-investigator of the five-year ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) which is designed to bring the corpus approach to bear on a range of social sciences. He is also a member of the multidisciplinary centre Security Lancaster, Lancaster Digital Humanities, and the Data Science Institute.
List of publications

 

Erik Steiner

Stanford University
ebs110@stanford.edu

Erik Steiner is the Co-Director and co-founder of the Spatial History Project at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford University and a former President of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS). The Spatial History Project is recognized as one of the world’s leading digital humanities labs engaged in spatial analysis and visualization – over the last 10 years it has developed more than 60 such projects and collaborated on dozens more. In addition to acting as Co-Director, Erik is an interaction designer and cartographer with deep experience working at the intersection of technology, creative arts, and academic scholarship in the humanities and social, and environmental sciences. He has led the design and development of dozens of interactive and information design projects through major grants from the Getty, Kress and Mellon Foundations, NEH, NSF, and ACLS.
CESTA website