Professor Todd Presner
Principal Investigator
Todd Presner is Chair of UCLA’s Digital Humanities Program and Ross Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature. Since 2018, he is Associate Dean of Digital Innovation in the Division of Humanities and Adviser to the Vice Chancellor of Research for Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences research. From 2011-2018, he was the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies.
Presner is the founder and director of HyperCities, a collaborative, digital mapping platform that explores the layered histories of city spaces. His research has been awarded numerous grants and prizes, including: the MacArthur “digital media and learning” prize and a Google Digital Humanities grant. His latest book, coauthored with David Shepard and Yoh Kawano, is Hypercities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities (Harvard University Press, 2013) which explores the “geospatial turn” within the humanities. The companion website is http://thebook.hypercities.com. He is also the author of Digital_Humanities (MIT Press, 2012), an exploration of the field co-authored with Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, and Jeffrey Schnapp; Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (Columbia University Press, 2007) which maps German-Jewish intellectual history onto the development of the railway system; and Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (Routledge, 2007), an analysis of the aesthetic dimensions of the strong Jewish body.
Caroline Luce, PhD
Chief Curator
is the Research and Digital Projects Manager of the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and the Chief Digital Curator of the Mapping Jewish Los Angeles Project. She received her Ph.D. in American History from UCLA in 2013 for her dissertation exploring the complexities of working-class identity and Yiddish-based labor and community organizing in Boyle Heights. She has published in American Jewish History, Shofar: A Journal of Jewish Studies, and In Geveb, and is currently developing a book manuscript based on her dissertation entitled, Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine: Jewish Radicalism, Labor and Culture in Los Angeles, 1900-1950. She has also curated several major exhibitions for MJLA, including The White Plague in the City of Angels, Hugo Ballin’s Los Angeles, and Recovering Yiddish Culture in Los Angeles.
Karen Wilson, PhD
Founding Chief Curator
Karen Wilson was the Kahn Research Fellow with the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies from 2012-2014 and the founding Head Curator for “Mapping Jewish Los Angeles.” Dr. Wilson curated the 2013 Autry National Center exhibition, “Jews in the Los Angeles Mosaic” and edited the companion volume of the same name published by the University of California Press. She is working on a book entitled On the Cosmopolitan Frontier: Jews, Social Networks, and Nineteenth-Century Los Angeles, that examines the ways in which diverse social networks shaped the emergent American city and the incorporation and identities of Jewish settlers in post-Gold Rush society.
David Wu
Technical Oversight and Research
A UCLA alumnus, David Wu joined the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies in 2007 and is currently the Digital Projects & Marketing Coordinator. Serving as the graphic designer for both print and web materials, Wu is responsible for both design and technical aspects of the Mapping Jewish Los Angeles project including the maintenance of the website and design elements in digital exhibits.
Contributors
Erik Greenberg, PhD
Curator
Erik Greenberg is the Director of Education at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Los Angeles. Erik has spent over a decade teaching a range of students from k-college and beyond on a wide variety of historical subjects ranging from the history of the American West to the intellectual and cultural history of the American Jewish experience. He is the forums manager of the online museum publication Plinth, and is an executive board member of the IsPrize Foundation, an organization that rewards American youth who develop practical solutions to national and global problems. Erik has lived in Los Angeles for over twenty years, and he has spent a considerable amount of time stuck in traffic in the Sepulveda Pass.
Max D. Baumgarten, PhD
Curator
Max D. Baumgarten recently completed his Ph.D. From the Department of History at UCLA. His dissertation, “Searching for a Stake: The Scope of Jewish Politics in Los Angeles from Watts to Rodney King, 1965-1992” traces the intensification of local Jewish political activity that began during the civil rights era as well as the factors that led to Jewish disengagement from local political and civic affairs by the early 1990s. He has published in American Jewish History, California History, as well as the American Jewish Archives Journal and currently serves as a public policy analyst at the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State, Los Angeles.
Cate Roman
Curator
Cate Roman is Associate Professor of Graphic Design at Woodbury University. An accomplished artist, designer, art director, and storyteller, Roman’s extensive professional experience ranges from large scale sculpture to exhibit graphics. Her interest in community building and social responsibility in design have kept her involved with community-based projects throughout her career. NPR’s StoryCorps and Roman’s own family’s experiences as immigrant grocery store owners were the inspirations for the exhibit From Grand Central Market to Supermarket: L.A. Jewish Grocers.
Naya Lekht
Curator
Naya Lekht received her Ph.D. from the Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Her dissertation, “Narratives of Return: Babi Yar and Holocaust Literature in the Soviet Union” explores the relationship between language and memory in constructing a unique repository of Holocaust Literature in Soviet Russia. Dr. Lekht is currently a visiting professor of Russian Language and Literature at California State University, Long Beach. She will be a scholar-in-residence at Oxford University in the summer of 2018 for the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism (ISGAP).
Anat Gilboa, PhD
Exhibition Coordinator
Dr. Anat Gilboa, a former Visiting Lecturer at the UCLA Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, is a multidisciplinary art-historian specializing in Jewish and Israeli visual culture, media and film, as well as gender in early-modern European art. Her research and courses examine the core themes that define modern Israeli identity and its complex representation. Her publications include an exhibition catalogue, My Heart is in the East, and I am in the Farthest West (University of Nebraska, 2014), a book, Images of the Feminine in Rembrandt’s Work (2004), book chapters and articles in American and European journals. Current projects include curating a 2019 exhibition/catalogue of Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller’s archive of early Zionist materials for Hillel at UCLA, and writing a study of race and gender in early cultural Zionism as demonstrated in Verwandlungen durch Licht (1936) by the photographer Helmar Lerski (1871-1956).
Saba Soomekh
Exhibition Coordinator
Saba Soomekh was born in Tehran and immigrated with her family to Los Angeles as a small child. Her book, From the Shahs to Los Angeles: Three Generations of Iranian Jewish Women between Religion and Culture, was awarded the Gold Medal 2013 Independent Publisher Book Award (Religion category) and served as the primary textbook for a recent sociology class she taught at UCLA in which students created the MJLA exhibit, Iranian Jewish Life in Los Angeles: Past and Present. Sommekh also served as Project Coordinator for the major exhibition, Light and Shadows: The Story of Iranian Jews, which ran at the Fowler Museum at UCLA from October 2012 through March 2013.
David G. Hirsch
Research Advisor
David G. Hirsch is the Librarian for Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies at UCLA and has been building up the library’s Judaica collections since 1989. In 2013 he received the UCLA Librarian of the Year Award. Hirsch received his BA Degree in Oriental Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and dual Master of Arts Degrees in Library Science and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago. He has lived traveled, studied and worked in many parts of the Middle East, most recently as an advisor to the National Library of Abu Dhabi.
Bill Katin
Research Assistant
Bill is in the doctoral program in the UCLA History Department, where he has been employed as a reader. He has enjoyed translating German publications composed by Rabbi Isaac Rulf in Frankfurt’s Stadt- und Universitatsbibliothek (until 1928, it was the Baron Carl von Rothschild Library). He has also translated parts of Isaiah Trunk’s Yiddish material, on the Jewish Councils of Eastern Europe during the Third Reich, which are housed in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Archives. Through the efforts of Professor Todd Presner, Bill had the opportunity to conduct interviews with a 100 year old Holocaust survivor. Bill is arranging access to German archives for a UCLA dissertation on German-Jewish businesses “aryanized” by Germans during the Third Reich.
Patrick Tran
Research Intern
A recent UCLA graduate, Patrick has been working with the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies since the summer of 2011. He has worked on the HyperCities Holocaust Survivor Stories Compilation and various HyperCities related projects. Tran contributed to the technical development of the Mapping Jewish LA project, primarily with HyperCities and other media.
Andy Trang
Research Intern
As a member of the HyperCities technical team Andy has worked on projects such as “Holocaust Survivor Stories” and “Mapping Jewish LA: Boyle Heights” and created the documentation for the HyperCities platform. Trang is also conducting research in the field of neurosurgery and neuro-oncology with UCLA’s Brain Tumor Laboratory and hopes to pursue a multidisciplinary career in digital humanities and medicine.
Elliot Yamamoto
Curator
Elliot Yamamoto (UCLA, ’13) majored in Architectural Studies and minored in GIS. During his senior year he worked as a GIS Intern for the Mapping Jewish Los Angeles Project and used his skills to develop the MJLA exhibit On the Map, which was featured at the Autry National Center exhibition, Jews in the Los Angeles Mosaic. Interested in the overlapping practices of architecture and urban design, urban geographies, and GIS applications, Elliot hopes to pursue a multidisciplinary career to advance the knowledge and creation of people-centered design and environments.