Core Research 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.

Kathryn Agnes Heuther

Postdoctoral Scholar

Kathryn Agnes Huether received her PhD in Ethnomusicology/Musicology from the University of Minnesota in 2021 and holds a master’s degree in religious studies/Jewish studies from the University of Colorado. She has held visiting appointments at Vanderbilt University and Bowdoin College and was the 2021-2022 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Research and American University’s Postdoctoral Fellow. A classically trained violinist (she studied with Angella Ahn of the Ahn Trio) and vocalist, Huether continues to seek out performance opportunities and enjoys folk, klezmer, and blue grass.

Her primary areas of research consider how music—or more broadly sound—mediates modes of contemporary understanding regarding history, memory, discrimination, and trauma with particular emphasis on Holocaust Memory and African American Slavery.

While at UCLA, Huether is researching the roles that sound plays in antisemitic virality on social media, in addition to completing her first book project, Sounding Trauma, Mediating Memory: Holocaust Economy and the Politics of Sound, on the subject of sound usage within contemporary Holocaust memory. This dynamic project draws on memory studies and trauma theory, as well as Musicology, to add a sonic dimension to our understanding of the complex political economy of the Holocaust.