Core Research Team
2023-2024
About
The goal of the ISH in-house “research hub” is to examine some of the core research questions animating the study of hate, which includes an exploration of its conceptual and terminological boundaries, both past and present. This hub is comprised of Prof. David N. Myers, Prof. Aaron Panofsky, and three post-doctoral scholars.
The Team
David N. Myers
Director
David N. Myers is the director of the Initiative to Study Hate. He is Distinguished Professor of History and holds the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History in the UCLA History Department. He is also the founding director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy, and serves as President of the Board of the New Israel Fund.
Aaron Panofsky
Associate Professor, Institute for Society and Genetics, Public Policy, and Sociology
Aaron Panofsky is a sociologist of science, knowledge, and culture with a special interest on the history, intellectual organization, and social implications of genetics.
Michele J. Wong, MS, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Scholar
Michele J. Wong, MS, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Initiative to Study Hate, housed in the Division of Social Sciences at UCLA. She earned her Ph.D. in Social Welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Wong’s research explores how hate fuels and perpetuates racism, and the complex ways hate operates at the intersection of gender and race. Specifically, her work focuses on (a) protective and risk factors for health and mental health outcomes among Asian American women, (b) intersectional stressors associated with work and health inequities, and (c) development of culturally relevant interventions that address intersectional stressors, particularly gendered racial microaggressions among Asian American women, at multiple levels.
Bethan Johnson
Postdoctoral Scholar
Dr. Bethan Johnson is a postdoctoral scholar with the Initiative to Study Hate, an interdisciplinary research program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Dr Johnson received both her MPhil and PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, and she also earned an additional certification in Terrorism Studies from the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on the processes of radicalisation to right-wing extremism, as well as those factors that sustain and/or further fanaticism. She has a particular interest in and experience with studying those instances that manifest political violence, most notably anti-democratic guerrilla fighting and neo-Nazi terrorism.
Naomi S. Taub
Postdoctoral Fellow
Naomi S. Taub is postdoctoral fellow with the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and the Initiative to Study Hate. She received a PhD in English, along with graduate certifications in Jewish Studies and Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies, from the University of Illinois in 2022. Her scholarship juxtaposes post-1948 fiction from the United States, South Africa, Israel, and Britain to demonstrate how contemporary Jewish literature de- and re-constructs identity through a constellation of multi-layered encounters that transcend national boundaries, revealing crucial connections between liberal internationalism, post/coloniality, and transhistorical fantasies of whiteness in the post-WWII Jewish Anglosphere. In particular, her current project aims to interweave discourses in Jewish literary studies and critical whiteness studies to explore how the whiteness constructed in and through contemporary Jewish literature emerges as always already “worlded,” that is, fundamentally constituted by a global network of political commitments, racialized subjectivities, aesthetic forms, and affective encounters. In so doing, she aims to demonstrate that both whiteness and Jewish literature are the products of and impetus for cultural, identitarian, and representational world-building within the Jewish Anglosphere and, moreover, that much of that contemporary Jewish writing demonstrates a set of interlocking formal and stylistic traits that reveal crucial relationships between identity, text, and world.