Director of Center: Dr. John Cox, Associate professor, Department of Global Studies; affiliated to Africana Studies, History, and Latin American Studies
Research and teaching interests: The Holocaust and comparative genocide; Racism, fascism, and imperialism; Working-class & labor history; Resistance and social movements. My Ph.D. is in History (UNC-Chapel Hill, 2006). My co-edited collection on genocide-denial was published in October 2021 and a 2nd edition of my To KIll a People: Genocide in the 20th Century (OUP, 2017) will be published in 2022, adding a chapter on Bosnia.
Contact: jcox73@uncc.edu
Center for HGHR Studies steering committee
Dr. Danielle Boaz, Associate professor, Department of Africana Studies
Research and teaching interests: Dr. Boaz’s research focuses on the structural racism ingrained in domestic and international mechanisms protecting civil, political, social and cultural rights. The bulk of her work addresses the legal proscription of African cultural practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the modern day impact of those laws on public perceptions of these practices.
Dr. Emek Ergun, WGST (Womens's & Gender Studies) and Global Studies
Dr. Ergun's research focuses on the political role of translation in disrupting local heteropatriarchal economies of knowledge and connecting feminist activists, texts, and movements across borders, particularly between the US and Turkey. Dr. Ergun recently co-edited Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives (Routledge, 2017; currently being translated into Korean) and is also a co-editor of Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (Routledge). She is an activist feminist translator and her most recent translation is of Octavia E. Butler’s classic science-fiction novel, Kindred, published in Turkey in March 2019.
Dr. Ella Fratantuono, History
Dr. Fratantuono's research focuses on migration, settlement, governmentality, and state-building in the Middle East and Southeastern Europe. Her current book project explores the emergence and development of a centralized migrant and refugee regime in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman Empire. Her most recent article, “Producing Ottomans: Internal Colonization and Social Engineering in Ottoman Immigrant Settlement,” was published by the Journal of Genocide Research in January, 2019.
Dr. Willie J. Griffin, History
Dr. Griffin served as the Chief Historian at the Levine Museum of the New South before joining our faculty in 2022. His research and teaching interests include 20th Century African American Public and Intellectual History; Civil Rights Movement and Black Print Culture History; African American Military and Labor History; African American Biography; and Black Charlotte History.
Dr. Gregory Mixon, Professor, Department of History
Research and teaching interests: Black Southern State Militia Companies, 1865-1910; Racial Violence 1865-1930; Race Relations; Black, Southern, and United States Urban History; Progressive era; Comparative History, especially United States South and Latin American during the nineteenth century.
Dr. Julia Robinson Moore, Associate Professor of African-American Religions and Religions of the African Diaspora, Department of Religious Studies
Research and teaching interests: Intersections of religion and racial violence in national and international contexts. Specifically, I am fascinated with the ways in which religion has often been used to justify acts of racism, racial violence, and terrorism in local and global contexts.
Professor Jillian Wegner, Instructor of Languages and Culture Studies and HGHR Studies
Wegner holds a Master's degree magma cum laude from La Universidad para la Paz in Sustainable Peace with a concentration in media studies. At UNCC, she has taught both in-person and online courses in global connections focusing on media and peace and arts & society film with an emphasis on social justice issues through foreign films. She has also worked in the non-profit sector for human trafficking lecturing at over 75 schools, organizations, and businesses throughout the country. She is currently working on a children's Holocaust book.
Affiliate Faculty of Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies
Members of the Steering Committee, above, are also Affiliate Faculty.
Dr. Chris Cameron, History
Research and teaching interests: Early American History; African American Religion; Slavery and Abolition; American Religious and Intellectual History; African American Freethought
Dr. Oscar de la Torre, Africana Studies
Research and teaching interests: African Diaspora in Latin America (slavery; maroons, or runaway slaves; post-emancipation period; oral history); History of Brazil, Amazonia, and Cuba (19th and 20thcentury); Environmental Studies (commodity history, labor and environment); Atlantic World History (slavery, revolution)
Dr. Catherine Fuentes, Anthropology
Research and teaching interests: Health and well-being of incarcerated women, domestic violence, violence cross-culturally, medical anthropology
Dr. Susanne Gomoluch, Languages and Culture Studies
Research and teaching interests: 18th- and 19th-century German literature and thought; Literature and Science, in particular psychology and medicine; Discourses on the creative imagination (Einbildungskraft) in literature, science, and philosophy; Travel Literature; Translation; Language Teaching and Pedagogy; The Holocaust in literature and film
Dr. Eric Hoenes, Religious Studies
Research and teaching interests: Religion and culture; ethnography of religion; language and communication
Dr. Charles Houck, Global Studies
Research and teaching interests: Globalization & resistance; Precolumbian states of Mesoamerica; settlement patterns in Yucatan, Mexico, and the political, economic and ecological factors that shaped this and other Maya polities; indigenous resistance to colonialism
Dr. Oscar Lansen, History
Research and teaching interests: Social History of War and Conflict; The Holocaust; History and Honors Methodology; History Pedagogy
Dr. Janaka Lewis, Director, WGST (Womens's & Gender Studies) and English
Research and teaching interests: 19th century African American literature, African American women writers, black feminist theory
Dr. Jill Massino, History
Research and teaching interests: Romania, Eastern Europe, Modern Europe, The Cold War, Gender, the Global South, Cultural History, Memory, Socialism and postsocialism
Dr. Elisabeth Paquette, Philosophy and WGST (Womens's & Gender Studies)
Research and teaching interests: Feminist theory, political philosophy, 19th and 20th century philosophy
Dr. Andrea Pitts, Philosophy
Research and teaching interests: Feminist Philosophy; Philosophy of Race; Latin American and U.S. Latina/o Philosophy; Social Epistemology; Decolonial and Postcolonial Studies
Prof. Bianca Potrykus, Languages and Culture Studies
Research and teaching interests: Second Language Acquisition, Multilingualism, Globalisation and Superdiversity, Critical Discourse Analysis, (Im)politenessTheory, German modern history and migrations, Language and Film of the Holocaust
Dr. Ritika Prasad, History
Research and teaching interests: South Asian history; history of technology; technology and society; colonial and imperial history, nationalism and decolonization; Subaltern history; postcolonial theory
Dr. Kristina Shull, History
Research and teaching interests: Immigration History, Mass Incarceration, US Foreign Relations, Social Movements, Climate Migration, Cold War, Public History
Dr. Martin Shuster, Philosophy; Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies
Research and teaching interests: ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, critical theory, and philosophy of religion
Dr. Carmen Soliz, History and Latin American Studies
Research and teaching interests: Social history of Latin America, especially Bolivia and the Andes; peasant politics, agrarian reform, rural state formation, nation building, citizenship and social movements in Latin America
Dr. Barbara Thiede, Religious Studies
Research and teaching interests: Hebrew Bible, Jewish history and spirituality, the history of European antisemitism, and Jewish magic
Dr. Beth Whitaker, Political Science and Public Administration
Research and teaching interests: African Politics, African International Relations, US-African Relations, Africa and the "War on Terror." Refugee Policy
