Thea Brophy (Calvin College)
Thea Brophy studied World History, English, and Spanish at Calvin College where her undergraduate thesis examined the role of the student protest movement in the Tlatelolco uprising in Mexico City in 1968.
She did graduate work in Latin American history at Rutgers University, focusing on twentieth-century grassroots movements and social justice issues. She is currently an academic counselor at Calvin College and also does freelance editing and manuscript consulting work for various historical projects.
She is the winner of this year’s Outstanding Advisors Award of the Michigan Academic Advising Association (MIACADA).
Jacob S. Eder (University of Pennsylvania)
Jacob S. Eder is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation project explores the German-American dimension of West German politics of memory during the 1970s and 1980s.
Eder is particularly interested in the ways in which the Federal Republic addressed the legacies of the Holocaust as part of its cultural diplomacy towards an American audience. Consequently, he examines the cooperation between German and American cultural and educational institutions.
As part of this research, he analyzes Germany’s changing relationship to the Nazi past during this time period as well as how these developments were perceived in the U.S.
Alexandra Gnade (Oldenburg)
Alexandra Gnade studied History and Political Science at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. She completed her studies with an MA thesis on the meaning of daily life for coming to terms with the past of the East German state (“Do we have to look at daily life to come to terms with GDR-History? A study of selected GDR-Museums of Daily Life”).
Since completing her studies, she has worked for the German Emigration Center in Bremerhaven and the Focke-Museum in Bremen.
Elaine Kelley (GHI Washington)
Elaine Kelley is a graduate student in German and European Studies in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her concentration is in Public Affairs and Transatlantic Public Diplomacy. In 2008, she earned a B.A. in both German and Political Science from Virginia Commonwealth University, having attended Trier University as part of her program of studies.
Elaine worked on data management for this project at the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington, DC.
Ana Maric (University of Tübingen)
Ana Maric is a student at the Eberhard Karls University located in Tübingen, Germany. She studies history and political science with focus on North American History and International Relations.
Her studies have led her to internships with the German American Institute in Tübingen, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Zagreb, Croatia, and the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. She was responsible for the coordination of the archival and bibliographical content for “The Nuclear Crisis” project.
Elisabeth Piller (University of Heidelberg)
Elisabeth Piller received her Bachelor of Arts (summa cum laude) in History (Honors) and Religious Studies from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is especially interested in transnational and American religious history. In her honors thesis, she employed the literary review “Decision” (1941) as a lens through which to understand European and American writers’ transcultural dialogue in conceptualizing an intellectual response to the National Socialist notion of “Kultur” before Pearl Harbor.
Her M.A. thesis will examine the 1920s Ku Klux Klan from a transnational historical perspective and contextualize it within a larger discussion of reactionary populist movements on both sides of the Atlantic.