Master of Arts in Holocaust & Genocide Studies - Virtual Information Session

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It is time. Thank you all so much for joining us. We're happy to have you joining us for our information session on our Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide studies. I am joined here by my colleague Dr Christina Morris, who is a faculty member in this program who is going to be giving an overview of this session. We hope to be able to give you some more information about how to apply to this program, the highlights of this program and.

With all of that being said, I'm gonna go ahead and turn things over to Christina.

Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us today. To hear a little bit about Stockton's program in Holocaust and genocide studies. I am doctor Christina Morris and I am an associate professor of communication studies.

And genocide studies at Stockton and the Marsha Radkov Grossman professor in Holocaust and genocide studies. So you might be wondering who are we? Who is the Stockton Master of Holocaust and Genocide studies program? Well, the first thing that I should point out is that Stockton is very much the land of acronyms. So instead of saying every time Master of Arts and Holocaust and genocide studies, we call our program MAHG.

Or Mog, right, the MOG program. So we are the MOG program, right. And and I'll start by just telling you a few fun facts about our program. So the mug program was founded in 1998 and it's the first program of its kind in the United States, the first masters to study Holocaust and genocide, right. Specifically, we grew out of Stocktons Holocaust Resource Center, which is very impressive. And we'll talk about that a little bit.

Later, and we're located in southern New Jersey SE, New Jersey, right near Atlantic City, about an hour from Philly and about 90 minutes from New York City. So what makes Stockton's MOG program unique, other than being the first in the country, of course. Well, Stockton's MOG program, it's not only our subject matter that you know is special. The MUD program offers a rigorous interdisciplinary.

Curriculum providing students with rich perspectives on core problems and issues if genocide, past and present. We're proud of our small class sizes and our seminars that are designed to meet the needs and interests of students. And through face to face and online courses taught by internationally renowned faculty, the program prepares its graduates for employment in education, museums and other organizations whose aim it is to understand.

Stop and prevent genocide. We also have a really generous funding program for our students, and through our generous fellowships and scholarships and our partnerships with organizations and universities around the world, we're really able to provide a diverse array of learning experiences both in the classroom and extra or Co curricular early.

Whoops, wrong button. OK, so now you might be wondering, well, who are the mug faculty? Right? Who are these people that teach these interesting classes? Well, the mug program posts an interdisciplinary faculty, a uniquely interdisciplinary faculty, the Mod faculty of expertise in history, political science, communication studies, criminal justice, anthropology, and education, along with occasional expert instructors that we bring in in fields.

Like law.

Religious studies, museum studies and others. And then all of us guys work together to ensure a really rich, interesting, intellectually stimulating program and to obviously usher in the success of all of our students. So let me introduce you to a few of us folks on the faculty. So you can see on this slide, the first you have is Doctor Russ Siegel. Dr Siegel is our leader. He is the program director of the MAG.

Program and the cofounder of Stockton's Refugee Studies initiative, Dr Siegel, focuses on issues in central and SE Europe.

During the Holocaust, but also he takes a very critical approach to the way the Holocaust has been studied and offers a lot of new directions for thinking about the Holocaust in his research. He is has had numerous prestigious fellowships and publishes really prolifically in both academic and popular press.

And next we have doctor Michael Hayes. Doctor Hayes is a professor of history by trade, but he is a core faculty member in the MAG program. And Doctor Hayes really looks at the ways that Germany has grappled with the legacies of the Third Reich and World War Two. And Doctor Hayes is the primary research director for the New Jersey Holocaust Survivors Project, which I'm going to show you in just a second. And then finally you have myself on this page.

And uh, my academic background is in rhetoric and my work considers pre and post conflict discourses at the intersection of gender, media, politics and public memory. My field work has mainly been in the Balkans with a focus on Serbian nationalist discourses, both leading up to the wars in the ex Yugoslavia and following those wars.

Next we have Doctor Mary Johnson and Doctor Johnson is a women's historian by training, but she is one of our education experts. She served as the senior historian for facing history and ourselves for more than 35 years. And today Doctor Johnson continues to work as a consultant for classrooms Without Borders and continues to be a net like a nationally sought after consultant in Holocaust and education helicopter and genocide.

Education and curricular development. Next we have Doctor Lauren Velasco, who's a professor of political science, and Doctor Velasco works on issues of transitional justice, human rights and international law with a focus on Latin America. And then you we have doctor Jaspan and White and Doctor Bonnin. White is a professor, professor of criminal justice, but with a background in anthropology, and she specializes in critical security studies.

Emergency Management, human security and responses to conflict in crisis and her field work has been conducted in Palestine as well as in Northern Ireland, and she is a huge volunteer with the Red Cross. OK, and then we have less, but not least on our list. Our newest addition to our Mod faculty is Doctor Jordan Corson. Doctor Corson is an assistant professor of education and his work focuses.

At the Nexus of migration studies and educational theory, he's published research in education, philosophy, anthropology, and teacher education. And so this is our our team, right, that the team like our Stockton team. In addition to these members of the mug faculty, the mug program also has a really special program where once they were, you know, hopefully, usually every year, we get to bring in a distinguished Professor of Holocaust.

The genocide studies and through this we have been able to host some of the like sort of biggest names in Holocaust and genocide studies both scholars and practitioners. And you can see just some of those folks listed here and and and you can if if you've done a lot of reading background reading in the field there is no doubt that you will recognize some of these names. Doctor Michael Berenbaum originally the founder one of the founders of the Holocaust.

Uh museum in DC now for the show is center Dr Samuel Totten right we have big you know lots and lots of interesting and important people to come to teach us about genocide. So unique faculty and and what else might be unique about Stockton? Well we really believe we have a unique curriculum curriculum. Our interdisciplinary we our approach blends foundational Holocaust and genocide scholarship with the most contemporary issues and questions.

In genocide studies, and this still allows for opportunities for deep case studies, so.

The kinds of things, then, that armad students learn about is rich and varied. And we study the Holocaust as a part of a mosaic of modern genocide and mass violence before, during and after the Second World War. So the Holocaust is one piece of that, right? But we tend to encourage the study of more sort of a broader conceptual ideas that the field is engaged with now, things like European empire building.

Settler colonialism, racial terror and white supremacy in the United States. Refugees, migration and human security, media and genocide, transitional justice, ecocide, omnicide. So all kind of like these sort of big areas, right? That and more.

I thought I would share with you just a little bit about what our mod curriculum looks like. So.

Uh, the mug it curriculum overall is 35 credit hours. Most of our classes are three credit hours with a couple of exceptions being one credit hour. All MOG students take 3 core courses, one one credit intro to graduate studies, which is you take in your first semester and then intro to Holocaust and genocide studies and research methods and Holocaust and genocide studies students then have 7 or 8.

Mog electives and those electives depend on which Capstone or thesis option you choose in terms of number. But within those Holocaust and within those maglev dives to our Holocaust focused and then the rest. The additional five or six can come from any of our mag electives. Then all students also take a one credit course to develop their proposal for their capstone or thesis. And then you do either your capstone or your thesis. Thesis would be 6 credits.

Traditional thesis capstones are much more interesting in the sense that you can do many different things with the capstone. We've had students in the past for their capstone one created a 10 episode Umm a podcast that was all about different genocides. One student created a really incredible graphic novel about genocide. So oftentimes our teachers will do different kinds of curriculum or classroom projects for Capstone.

So there's all kinds of oh, and you can also do an internship for Capstone. So there's all kinds of different options for your capstone, right, in addition to the traditional academic thesis route, if that's where you want to go, OK and some some of our recent NMHG electives. I wanted to sort of give you a sense of the different kinds of electives that we've been offering lately. So you can see that there is a blend of like case studies like history.

Of the Holocaust, the fall of Yugoslavia, the war in Bosnia, the Armenian genocide, right? As well as these mug courses that are more about scope, like we were talking about, right? Memory and commemoration, climate change, ecocide and omnicide, subtler colonialism and genocide, right, etcetera.

Gender war and genocide. So our curriculum is unique, it's engaged, and we do a really good job of blending the foundational things that everyone who studies these things should know with the more sort of contemporary recent things that our field is sort of caring about now. Another fantastic, unique thing about Stockton's program is our unique blend of truly passionate students. You can see that our students.

Come from a really broad background. It, like our students, come from all over the world.

Sorry, our students come from backgrounds and interests. You have peers from all over the US and the world. Some are all online, some are all in person and some are a blend of both, right. So we facilitate which are like the type of learning in that sense that you prefer. Some of our students are fresh from their undergrad degrees, some come later in life for various reasons. Some are K12 teachers coming for to get the degree as an enhancement.

Some come to us with existing higher degrees in law or or other fields who just want to study this area. Some have a strong heritage interest in the field. So maybe their family is Armenian by descent, and they're very, very interested in studying the Armenian genocide, for example. And some of our students are continuing to PhD programs and pursuing an academic career. What they all share in common is a passion for understanding the processes of global mass.

Violence and genocide.

Oops, sorry one. OK, so we we have for you. I put together for you just an example so you can see like how diverse and interesting our student body really is. So one of our current Max students, Dominic Pellegrini, Dominique got a Bachelors in philosophy from Stockton, right? Dominic is a full time student. He's primarily face to face and his research representation at Marconi Plaza settler colonialism, colonialism, fascism and genocide is.

A really unique and interesting project that uses ideas of settler colonialism and genocide to critique the war over statues in a particularly Christopher Columbus statues in Philadelphia. The next student I wanted to tell you guys about is raneem gareeb ranim is a Palestinian international student from the West Bank. She began as an online student, but then eventually we were able to bring her and now she lives on campus and she's a full time student.

And Renee's research complex identities Palestinian refugees expelled from Syria after 2011.

Is really exciting and groundbreaking. She's able to do actual interviews with refugees fleeing the Syrian war who are currently living in Jordan, and it's just a very exciting project.

Next we have Elizabeth Marnian Corona. And Elizabeth is a practicing licensed therapist and a full-time public school mental health professional. So that means she's only a part time student for us, right? Because she's got a whole another full time job. And Elizabeth is primarily online, but because she lives close enough, she comes to campus for special events and for, you know, occasionally. But mostly she does her classes online. Elizabeth's research, Elizabeth.

Is one of our sort of people who maybe initially came for a heritage interest because she is Armenian by heritage and her research is on Armenians in Jerusalem and the transgenerational transmission of trauma. And I'll talk a little bit more in a minute about some of the international opportunities these students have gotten through the program. And then finally, a student to highlight is Mary Hotaling. Mary is a full-time high school teacher. She teaches literature.

And she's a fully online student part-time. And Mary's project like that, her capstone is creating a Holocaust and genocide Research Center at her high school, right. So you could see that Mary's is more of a capstone, right? It's more of a project than it is a thesis, right. But it's an important and interesting project. And we have so many wonderful resources for K12 educators in our program that it really works out well.

OK. So we also have at Stockton a host of really exciting creative research opportunities. And I would be, you know, probably spanked if I didn't tell everybody about the Holocaust Resource Center. The Sam, the Sarah and Sam chauffeur Holocaust Resource Center has been around since 1986, right? So it way predates even the MOG program and the Center collects oral testimonies.

From Holocaust survivors, liberators, and rescuers in New Jersey, and helps survivors write and publish their memoirs. The Resource Center boasts the most extensive English language holdings on the Holocaust and other genocides potentially in the country, and they consistently run really exciting exhibitions, research projects, lecture series, and K12 education.

Seminars and resources and and has a really substantial and important network of other organizations like it all over the world, so.

This is a picture of the outside of our Holocaust Resource Center. You can see around the top there are names of various survivors and rescuers, people who are sort of well known. And then you can see here that the.

The opening of the center itself, like the entrance of the center, sorry, and the beams up here, which are all like architecturally very important, etcetera. So the Holocaust sent Resource Center is.

Affiliated with the MOG program, right. They work together and also provides, right, all a whole different set of opportunities sort of in addition. So I wanted to share with you all a video about the Holocaust center and yeah, so you get to know a little more about what we see.

OK, so.

I just want to point out that the last part of the video that was about that exhibition that we have in the Holocaust center, you saw a picture of Doctor Mike Hayes and it talked about how our students participated in the project and in fact they did, right. That whole exhibition was under the direction of Doctor Mike Hayes, but our students participated in right, gathering the information, gathering the artifacts, etcetera, putting together elements of the exhibition, right. So in addition to that specific project.

Right. That stuff that you just saw in the video, the Holocaust, the Holocaust Resource Center continues to partner with Doctor Hayes in the South Jersey Holocaust survivors project. And this has been really exciting, just such a fantastic, maybe like 40 or more students in the last several generations of our of classes have been able to participate in this project. So this project is that South Jersey Survivors project focuses on collecting the testimonies of Holocaust survivors.

From New Jersey, right. And so the students have been able to interview them and and you know help gather information and while their actual interviews are part of an archive that's kept in the Holocaust center, through their interviews we are able to create these little snapshots, right. So that and our students write these as well so that people can come to our website, learn a bit more about the New Jersey Holocaust survivors and then if people want to do more specific research then they can come and.

Um, you know, do that research in our actual center. OK. So the collecting of the testimonies is another element. And then the last sort of element right now that we've been working on with that specific project is putting together profiles of Holocaust survivor owned businesses throughout New Jersey. And there's little profiles of those businesses on the website. But as a, as an addendum to this part of the project, we've been working on a digital mapping project that goes with it.

And the digital mapping project, like right where you see in front of you and this is like a screenshot, but you can see like all the different that look like little tiny chickens. That is where all the Jewish chicken farms were. And then these other, the pictures that look like the Star of David, these are other Jewish businesses that were not necessarily chicken farms but were from Holocaust survivors in South Jersey, right. So as students you can work on these projects and get, you know, gain real experience, right.

Or you can work on your own project. OK so.

Unique Co curricular opportunities, right. And so obviously in addition to sort of the research opportunities, we have a host of really cool Co curricular opportunities for students and faculty and community members that are really enabled through our many, many partnerships. So you can see we have the refugee study initiative that was piloted initially by Doctor Siegel, our program director and Doctor Bonnin White.

And uh, the refugee studies initiative is an educational and sort of like Co curricular programming initiative that seeks to support cross disciplinary research on displacement and refugees through scholarships, events and other elements that facilitate discussion among faculty, students and people from the broader community and around the world. And we they work in partnership with several institutions and organizations.

Throughout the world now through the Refugee Studies initiative. For example, in 2022 we held an international workshop on refugees and displacement to mark the 70th anniversary since the UN Refugee Convention and associated with that. Then we had a fantastic exhibition that was a UN exhibition about refugees called after the end of the world displaced persons and displaced persons camps.

And this was a, it was a really fantastic like Co sponsored exhibition. So this is just another sort of example of the kinds of interdisciplinary Co curricular academic.

Opportunities that we have right that that people can get involved in or you know be a part of. We have so, so, so, so many events that we bring and and have as opportunities. Some of our events are online and some are in person and some are a blend right. But this here you can just see an example of a few of the things that are even just coming up. So finding the disappeared the role of truth commissions and post conflict justice initiatives in Guatemala, Colombia and Mexico, right.

Um, here we have fully human person citizenship and rights, right? So we have various lecturers. We have professional development opportunities for the students that help them. You know how to get into conferences, how to present papers, stuff like that. We also have these sort of cross some.

Across institutional academic panels with we've had several in the last couple of years with academics from the Ukraine and really just talking about.

You know both, both the conflict there, what it means to be a a scholar in that region now etcetera, etcetera. So that's just a few of the examples. There are so, so many different of these kinds of activities that we have every semester including book clubs, book discussions etcetera.

Now study tours.

Huh. Study tours are one of the most special things about Stockton. In one of the really special things about our program for students, study tours offer the opportunity to learn while traveling internationally under the direction of experts from Stockton. In the past we've done a lot of a range of Holocaust specific study tours and they've ranged. They've visited places in Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and and those Holocaust related study.

Hours are often typically accompanied by Holocaust survivors as well. More recently, we've also been developing a range of other kinds of study tours. And so in 2019, Doctor Siegel let us study tour to Thessaloniki, which is the contested Macedonia region of Greece and Haifa in Israel. Doctor Siegel, along with Doctor Roselle, another Stockton professor, LED a group of students that included five from Stockton, 5 from Greece.

And five from Israel, Palestine. And they got to go to these different spaces and study the idea of these sort of contested cities, right. And then this past summer, you can see in this picture, this past summer, Dr Siegel let another study tour, this time to Cyprus and to Israel, Palestine again with Doctor Rossell. But this time the the subject was the idea of divided cities. So they went to Nicosia.

In Cyprus, and they went to Jerusalem. In the process again, they had students, both Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot, as well as students from Israel and Palestine, as well as students from Stockton, all participating. So in this picture you can see, right, several of our Stockton students, including Elizabeth Memorian Corona, which I mentioned earlier, was a student who studies the Armenian diaspora.

In Jerusalem, this was an incredible opportunity for her because she not only got to go on the study tour, right? But she got to kind of start to engage in some of her field work and and lay the ground for what will become her dissertation, OK.

Now.

By now you're probably like, wow, this all sounds so exciting, but how do people. Right, how do we afford it, right, how do people pay for it? Well, I gotta tell you, Stockton smog program has a host of unique funding opportunities. And I mean funding for all. And and that is something unique to Stockton's program. We have graduate assistantships. We have Stockton Foundation scholarships with a special pool of money set aside for.

Mob students, right? We have another pool of funding to help support student research and travel to things like conferences and archives. And we have special funding for students working on refugees and displacement. And this includes students who are in fact refugees, right? Students from other countries who, you know are interested in our program, who are in fact refugees. They're special funding for that as well. They're special funding, I believe, also for people who work on.

Armenian genocide, so.

Because.

The Holocaust Resource Center has such a long history and our program is unique and has such a long history and so many relationships. We have some really unique funding opportunities to help students be able to come to our program.

So after all of this, then who are the MOG alumni who graduates from this program and what do they do? Well, art my alum work in place in nonprofit. They work in NGO development work, museums, cultural institutions, lots of K12 educators, Community College professors. Some use this as a stepping stone to PhD study and an academic career. Some come as a supplement right to a law degree. So you have all these.

Different ways that people actually use and have used the mod degree and to give you some really exciting specific examples.

But you could see that when they graduated after their names. So we have Tiara, and Tiara is currently a PhD student in cultural studies at Claremont Graduate University. But that doesn't tell the whole story. When Tiara was applying to PhD programs after she was graduating from art program, she got accepted with full funding to every single PhD program she applied to.

Right. So that's you know, it's it's pretty astounding. We have Doug survey and Doug survey graduated earlier from our program in 2002. But today Doug survey is the executive director for the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust education and he's still works really closely with our program. We have Doctor Cheyenne loyal O four graduate who's now a professor of political science at Penn State and we have Rachel Herman who is now an educational specialist.

At the USC Shoah Foundation. So she works at like arguably one of the biggest Holocaust related institutions in the United States. We have Amanda Covin, class of 19, who is now the Director of education at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. Lori Garcia, class of 18, who is the senior director of education at the Holocaust Museum in Houston. Andrea Heyman, class of 16, assistant director for Young leadership.

Than digital education for the Anti Defamation League and Jess Holton, class of 13, assistant manager of Education at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. So you can see our folks go far and wide right. So have I peaked your interest about our program yet? Would you like to know where you can learn more? Well, I am about to tell you if you want to learn more about the program.

You can visit the MHG website.

Which or you can go to stockton.edu graduate Holocaust and genocide studies and you'll find more about the program itself. You can also contact Doctor Roz Siegel and I put his e-mail address on there. And Doctor Siegel can tell you more about the program but also can tell you more about the funding opportunities.

And then ohh this slide looks messy. This slide is when you feel like you maybe are ready to apply, you go ahead and you can contact stockton.edu back slash graduate. You can e-mail us or you can give us a call and down below you see our priority deadline. So you can still get in for spring 23. Oh and and and we you can still get in for obviously fall 23 as well which has a slightly longer.

Red line. So that is all that I have for you guys today. I hope that you've enjoyed hearing about our program and I am happy to take any questions folks have.

Well, Christina, Christina, thank you so much for sharing all of this information. And yes, please feel free that if you're watching this to reach out with additional questions, graduate admissions would also be more than happy to assist you. Our e-mail is gradschool@stockton.edu. So again, grad school at stockton.edu. And we're happy to to again help with any questions you have about the program. But I have to say personally in listening to this presentation, it made me excited and think about going back to grad school again.

You, but the amount of detail that you all have put into this program, the amount of care that you take with your students has really come through in your presentation and I hope that our audience has seen that today. And so thank you so, so much for for sharing that.

Thanks.

Thank you.

So, so with that, we're going to conclude our program for today and again reach out to us grad school staffed and WVU or you can visit our website www.brockton.edu back slash graduate that will take you to all of our programs and then you can learn more about our mod program from there. So we hope you have a wonderful day and we hope to see you on campus soon. Have a wonderful day. Take care. Bye, everybody.