Holocaust and Genocide Studies

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.

Joseph W. Moser, Ph.D.

New 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.

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. 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)

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.