Berlin Fellowship 2023
Sixteen fellows participated in Widen the Circle’s year-long Berlin Fellowship, beginning in June with an immersive learning program in Germany.
Khari Bowman is a program coordinator at Facing History and Ourselves in Memphis. Khari believes that this history is extremely relevant to modern police killings that have taken place in Memphis. She received her degree in English Literature at Bryn Mawr College, where she worked to create more awareness of issues of race and social justice issues on campus.
Lisa Bratton teaches history at Tuskegee University and is a historian for the Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project. She has led an oral history project at Historic Brattonsville, the South Carolina plantation on which her ancestors were enslaved. Her upcoming book, "I am the Forever," repositions 150 years of the plantation's records to describe how enslaved people resisted the brutality of enslavement and its terrorizing aftermath.
Stacy Burdett has decades of experience as a Jewish community advocate on civil and human rights issues. She works with organizations, officials, and thought leaders on topics including communications and strategies to fight antisemitism and bigotry. She previously served as vice president for government relations, advocacy, and community engagement at the Anti-Defamation League. She also served as the first government and external relations director at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Stephan Conrad works with young people and conducts political and historical work with Treibhaus e.V., an Obermayer Award winning association in Döbeln, Germany, an area where the far right has strong support. He is a founding member of the Saxon State Working Group on Dealing with [Nazism]. His remembrance work has included projects on the armaments industry and forced labor, Jewish life in Döbeln, and Nazi "euthanasia" and eugenics activities in the region.
Melanie Roth Gorelick is CEO of Elluminate, an organization with Jewish and feminist values that promotes social justice and equal opportunity for all women and girls. She previously served as senior vice president of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. She has dedicated her life’s work to women’s rights and social justice causes in roles at the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest and the U.N. Development Fund for Women (renamed U.N. Women), among others.
Matthias Hass is head of the education and research as deputy director of the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial Site and Education Center in Berlin. Matthias was the director of the U.S. arm of Action Reconciliation Service for Peace in Philadelphia from 2005 to 2009. As a political scientist, he has specialized in the fields of historical foundations of politics and the politics of memory. He has taught at the Free University in Berlin, York University in Toronto, and Touro College Berlin.
Tanya Huelett is senior director of educator content development for Facing History and Ourselves, and oversees all content creation for teachers and other educators. She is an experienced historian and educator in the field of moral and ethical education. Tanya taught history at New York University, the Double Discovery Center at Columbia University, and the Brearley School. She has been awarded fellowships by the United Negro College Fund, the Ford Foundation, and several others.
Kevin King is the founder and executive director of King’s Canvas Gallery and Studio in Montgomery, Alabama. King’s Canvas is a creative space that provides opportunity and access to an underdeveloped and underexposed art community in Montgomery. Kevin seeks to honor the community by preserving its history and using the arts as a means to physically and economically develop neighborhoods and to help people in the areas of entrepreneurship, financial literacy, and life skills.
Rev. Tamara Lebak is an educator, curriculum designer, facilitator, trauma-informed practitioner of restorative justice, minister, and writer. Her remembrance work includes codesigning the Tulsa Race Massacre Institute and the Clara Luper Institute. Tamara is the founder of the Restorative Justice Institute of Oklahoma, where she teaches leaders to work with resistance, adapt to circumstances without losing their identity, and lift up voices that might otherwise go unheard.
Evan Milligan has spent more than two decades serving Black communities and pro-democracy efforts in the Deep South. He was the named plaintiff in Milligan v. Merrill, in which the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2023 ruled that Alabama must redraw its voting districts to comply with the Voting Rights Act. He founded Alabama Forward, which engages nonpartisan organizations to expand voting and voting rights. Previously, he worked for the Equal Justice Initiative, designing and leading community engagement throughout the country to memorialize local racial history.
Steve Murray is the director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH). He has been an advocate for historical introspection as a basis for building organizational inclusiveness. Honest examination of the ADAH’s history of supporting racial discrimination is a key element of the agency’s 2020 Statement of Recommitment. In 2022, the agency announced that it would work to repatriate its collection of Native American ancestral remains and funerary objects. .
Viktoria Peter developed her passion for remembrance work as a member of the Anne Frank Zentrum’s youth network. She studied Translation, Cultural Studies, and Intercultural European Studies in Leipzig and Regensburg, Germany, and Madrid, Spain. She works as a translator and political educator, and her main areas of interest are remembrance culture and socio-ecological transformation.
Amy Spitalnick Amy Spitalnick is CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. She is also leading a project on antisemitism and democracy in partnership with the Aspen Institute and a number of major foundations. Amy previously served as executive director of Integrity First for America, which won its groundbreaking lawsuit against the hate groups responsible for the right-wing violence in Charlottesville in 2017.
Nina Taubenreuther is the managing director of Zweitzeugen (Second Witnesses), an organization that turns young people into “witnesses” by teaching them the life stories of Holocaust survivors. Zweitzeugen helps students as young as 10 develop empathy andl a stronger perspective on prejudice and hate in the world today.
Dave Tell teaches at the University of Kansas, where he is co-director of the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities. His research and work centers on issues of race, memory, and the digital humanities. Since 2014, he has focused on the legacy of the murder of Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta, including partnering with the Emmett Till Interpretive Center and designing an exhibit for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Dave is the author of “Remembering Emmett Till.”
Patrick Weems is the cofounder and executive director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, Mississippi. The Center was formed to confront the brutal truth about Emmett Till’s 1955 murder and to seek justice for the community and the Till family. With a master’s degree from the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, and prior roles as a Monument Lab fellow and W.K. Kellogg Fellow, Patrick has spent more than a decade working in racial and restorative justice.