Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Joseph W. Moser, Ph.D.

Director of the Holocaust and Genocide Education Center
jmoser2@wcupa.edu
(Languages and Cultures)

Dr. Moser is Professor of German in the Department of Languages and Cultures. As a second generation Holocaust survivor, Dr. Moser grew up in Vienna, Austria. His father Dr. Jonny Moser (1925-2011) was a survivor of the Holocaust, and an errand boy for Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest during the Holocaust. Dr. Jonny Moser was one of the first Holocaust historians in Austria. Dr. Joseph W. Moser is a trained Germanist and has published articles on the legacy of German-speaking Jewish writers in Czernowitz, and he has published articles on his late father's work as a pioneer in Holocaust Studies. Furthermore, Dr. Moser has published on Austrian writers Thomas Bernhard and Lilian Faschinger; the German Detective Fiction; and Franz Antel’s Bockerer films. He edited and published his late father’s book manuscript on the first deportations of Viennese Jews to the East during the Holocaust: Jonny Moser, Nisko: Die ersten Judendeportationen. (Vienna: Steinbauer, 2012).

Dr. Moser received his B.A. in German and French from Hiram College, his M.A. in German literature from the Ohio State University, and his Ph.D. in German literature from the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Brewster, Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice, received her Ph.D. from the Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice. Dr. Brewster’s areas of specialization include domestic violence, criminological theory, research methodology, and alternatives to incarceration.

Megan Corbin, Ph.D.

mcorbin@wcupa.edu

(Languages and Cultures)

Dr. Corbin is Professor of Spanish in the Department of Languages and Cultures. Her research is on testimonial writing and memory studies, specifically focusing on cultural production from the post-dictatorship period of the Southern Cone (Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay). Her book, Haunted Objects: Spectral Testimony in the Southern Cone Post-dictatorship (2021) analyzes the changed relationship between the surviving subject and the material world, tracing the role of the material in narrating the traumatic past of the political prisoners in detention and the disappeared victims of the state terror. The book has been praised as “absolutely necessary for anyone interested in the ethical question of interrogating the past.”

Dr. Corbin received her two B.A. degrees in Spanish and Political Science, as well as her M.A. and PhD degrees in Hispanic and Lusophone Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, with a minor concentration in Feminist and Critical Sexuality Studies from the University of Minnesota. She also worked as an intern with New Tactics in Human Rights, a division of the Center for Victims of Torture during her graduate studies and currently teaches their advocacy framework for Human Rights intervention in her undergraduate courses.

Laura A. Detre, Ph.D. ldetre@wcupa.edu 

(Languages and Cultures)

Dr. Detre's research centers on biographies of Holocaust survivors in Hollywood. She regularly teaches the German Culture Cluster course EGE 409: Impact of the Holocaust on Literature and Film (taught in English). Dr. Detre received her B.A. in History from Hiram College, her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of Maine.

Dr. Friedman is a professor in the Department of History. He has served as historian at the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in Los Angeles. His first book, The Lion and the Star: Gentile-Jewish Relations in Three Hessian Communities, 1919-1945 (University Press of Kentucky), was declared one of 1998's "outstanding academic books." His most recent publications include Rainbow Jews: Gay and Jewish Identity in the Performing Arts, Performing Difference: Representations of the ‘Other’ in Film and Theater, and The History of the Holocaust (Routledge).

Dr. Friedman received his B.A. in history from Kent State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Dr. Gaydosh received her Ph.D. in History at American University in May 2010. Her area of expertise is modern German history and church history, and she completed her dissertation, under the direction of Richard Breitman, on Father Bernard Lichtenberg, the prelate of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin who protested against Nazi policies towards Jews and persons with disabilities. Father Lichtenberg was imprisoned for two years in Berlin. Following his incarceration, Lichtenberg died in a hospital en route to the Dachau concentration camp.

Jordan Schugar, Ph.D. jschugar@wcupa.edu

(English)

Professor Jordan Schugar teaches courses in the English Department and the Digital Humanities and new Media program. His scholarship is centered on digital storytelling, digital literacy, and accessible education abroad, specifically in Rwanda where he is engaged in various conservation-related projects and activities associated with the Gishwati Primate Project and the Shinehouse Gishwati Research Station. Students participating in this program have the opportunity to study the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi, to learn about inter-generational narratives of survivors, and to connect it to the Holocaust and other genocides in Africa, Asia, and Europe using digital and analog research methodologies. 

A native of Washington, D.C., Dr. Schugar earned his Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction from the University of Maryland, College Park. Previously, he studied at the University of Colorado, Boulder (B.A., English) and Humboldt State University (M.A., English Literature).

A native Mississippi and granddaughter of a sharecropper, Southern and cultural historian, LaTonya Thames-Taylor is a magna cum laude graduate of Tougaloo College (1992) and the University of Mississippi (1994, 2005). At West Chester University, she is an Associate Professor ofHistory, Director of the African American Minor, Chair of the Multicultural Faculty Commission, Chair of the Executive Committee of the Frederick Douglass Institute, and the Director of the FDI Summer Scholars Program. In the community, she serves in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as the Chair of Education Committee.