The Center for the Study of Antisemitism hosts Visiting Scholars each semester who bring a range of scholarly expertise and multidisciplinary perspectives to our intellectual community.

Irit is an interdisciplinary historian working on German and Jewish social and legal history with a focus on judicial prejudices, antisemitism and racism in the twentieth century. Irit is currently working as a research fellow at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes against Humanity at the Graduate Center, and teaching a History of the Holocaust course in this Spring semester at Hunter College CUNY. Irit’s research specializations are modern European history, Jewish History, the Holocaust, Antisemitism, and the German legal system. Her research project will focus on developing a chapter of her dissertation that analyzes the 1926 Magdeburg Affair, as part of her book manuscript.

Aleksandra’s area of research is situated in international human rights law, and in particular, in legal methods of counteracting antisemitism. Aleksandra has been academically engaged with this issue for the last 15 years, and her doctoral dissertation was devoted to legal mechanisms of fighting antisemitism available in international law, in historical and comparative perspective. Aleksandra conducts her research in a comparative legal perspective and in an interdisciplinary manner, in the intersections of law with political science, international relations, history and social psychology. During her time at the CSA, she plans to continue research for a scholarly article on decoding the concept of Holocaust distortion, which poses a much more difficult legal challenge than explicit Holocaust denial.

Marcia is an art historian active in the field of medieval studies where she has explored the social function of pictorial narratives displayed on church walls, the religious import of maps and diagrams as knowledge-generating devices, and the visual conduct of Christian-Jewish polemic in illuminated manuscripts, notably Bibles. Her current research, in line with the recent trend toward envisioning a “global Middle Ages,” probesChristian artistic approaches to Jewish scriptural patrimony across the premodern ecumene from the Byzantine Empire and Latinate Europe to highland Ethiopia (c. 300–c.1500). During her time at the Center, Marcia will continue research for a number of scholarly essays as well as further new research connecting contemporary antisemitism with medieval roots.

Christopher is a historian in the field of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He is an adjunct professor of history at Washington University St. Louis where he teaches The Twentieth Century: Age of Genocide, Jews and Christians in Nazi Germany, and History of the Holocaust. His publications include Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany (Indiana University Press, 2012) and “Race, Religion, and the Genocide of the Jews in Nazi Germany,” in The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Mass Atrocity, and Genocide (Routledge, 2022). His scholarship resides on the borders of cultural, intellectual, and religious history. At the center, Christopher will be working on his second book, Purifying the Volk, which focuses on Protestant-Jewish relations in southwest Germany and will fill an important gap in historical research about antisemitism shortly before, during, and after the Shoah.