Project Fellows

Faculty Fellows

Jochen Hellbeck

Phone: (917) 436-8176

Bio: Jochen Hellbeck’s research focuses on individual life stories and the shaping of the self in modern Europe, with a primary focus on the Soviet Union. He particularly seeks to understand the place of individuals in the context of cataclysmic events of the 20th century: the Russian Revolution, Stalin’s terror regime, and the Second World War. His work research has contributed to a more capacious and humane understanding of the Soviet Union, of World War II, and of how consciousness survived in societies that supposedly eradicated it. Jochen's RCHA project studies notions of life and death in the racist imagination of the Nazi regime and in the universalist Soviet war culture - in comparison as well as in their deadly clash. 

Erica Goldblatt Hyatt

Phone: 848-932-8485

Bio: Dr. Erica Goldblatt Hyatt is a university professor, administrator, and private therapist with nearly 15 years' worth of experience in the field of clinical social work. She is currently the Assistant Director of the Doctorate of Social Work degree program at Rutgers and is also an adjunct faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice.  Dr. Goldblatt Hyatt is one of the few therapists in the country who specializes in working with women who have ended a wanted pregnancy due to fetal anomaly. Her research on this topic has been published in academic journals, on commercial blogs, and on popular news sites. She has been featured repeatedly in media and press conferences by Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, and is known in Pennsylvania as one of the foremost speakers and advocates on the topic of reproductive justice.  Her published "ACCEPT" model of counseling women with fetal anomaly is the only exclusive model for social workers and other mental health clinicians that utilizes modern grief theory, narrative therapy, and cognitive interventions to address the many challenges of loss that this community experiences. The core of Dr. Goldblatt Hyatt's work centers around talking about experiences that are usually stigmatized, closeted, or hidden. As a clinician scholar, she uses both her clinical and research experience to bring awareness to marginalized communities. She can be followed on Twitter @erica_DSW

Barbara Cooper

Phone: 848-932-8525

Bio: Barbara Cooper’s undergraduate and graduate training ranges from the “great books” of the Western tradition to the languages and cultures of Africa, with detours into experiential learning and art school. Her doctoral work at the African Studies Center of Boston University exposed her to the Hausa language, the political economy of agriculture, and the anthropology of gender. Professor Cooper’s research draws upon both oral and archival sources to reconstruct the social and cultural history of West Africa. Her focus is on the former French colonies of the Sahel, particularly Niger, where she has conducted fieldwork for thirty years. She is the author of three books and numerous articles and chapters on the history of Niger and the Sahel.  

Mark McGovern

Phone: 732 -235-5361

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Olga F. Jarrín 

Phone: 848-932-1171

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Elaine LaFay

Phone:

Bio:  Elaine LaFay is a historian of climate and the body, specializing in the nineteenth-century United States. My current research seeks to understand the entanglements between climatology, medicine, and imperialism. My RCHA project, At the Tropics' Brink: Climates of Disease and Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf South, explores how medical and atmospheric knowledge were entangled with American imperial anxieties and ambitions in the newly acquired territories of the Gulf South—Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. 

Trip McCrossin

Bio: Trip McCrossin has been a member of Rutgers' Philosophy Department since 2003, working in various ways on the history and legacy of the Enlightenment in philosophy and popular culture.

Graduate Fellows

Jeffery Berryhill

Bio: Jeff Berryhill is a third-year student in the History Department at Rutgers. Prior to arriving at Rutgers, Jeff earned an MA in Historical Studies from the New School for Social Research and a BA from the Evergreen State College. His research interests include late twentieth century American political economy, public health & the provision of care, and social movements & protest. 

Daniel Bottino

Bio:  Danny Bottino is a doctoral candidate from Kittery Point, Maine.  He received his BA in History and Psychology from Tufts University and his MA in European Studies at Yale University.  At Rutgers, his dissertation research focuses on the interaction of cultural memory with the landscape in early modern England, Ireland and colonial Maine, with an emphasis on the role of landscape memory in the process of English colonization. 

Joanna Federico

Bio: Joanna is a second-year history PhD student at Rutgers. She holds a BA from the University of Notre Dame and an MA in History from the University of Louisville. Her research focuses on the history of public health with particular emphasis on women, children and adolescents in the late twentieth century United States. Joanna has previously investigated the influence of collective memory on breast feeding advocacy. She is currently examining the science and politics behind youth violence prevention efforts developed by Congress and various agencies of the federal government in the wake of Columbine and other mass school shootings in the late 1990s.

Eri Kitada

Amadi Iruka Ozier

Bio: Amadi Ozier is a PhD Candidate in English Literature. Her dissertation explores the use of humor in African-American literature as a technology of discipline, producing alternative forms of black social thought. Her work often examines the intersections between humor and violence in American cultural production, focusing in particular on blackface minstrelsy and lynching mobs as two endemically American cultural art-forms.

Erica Reed

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Harisan Nasir

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