People
The Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies is a thriving interdisciplinary research hub with particularly close links to the Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities. The team is comprised of academic staff, administrative staff and postgraduate researchers. We welcome proposals for new research projects and ideas for talks and presentations.
Institute Director
Ralph Emanuel Director of the Weidenfeld Institute
Core Fellows
Professor of Political Journalism
Kate Marrison
Research Fellow, Landecker Digital Memory Lab
DAAD Professor for Jewish East European History
Yossi Harel Chair in Modern Israel Studies
Professor of Digital Memory, Heritage and Culture
Diana Franklin
Centre Manager
- Research Associates
Dr. Pnina Shuker is a research associate at the Weidenfeld Institute for Jewish Studies. She also serves as a Visiting Fellow at the University of South Wales; a lecturer at Haifa University, Tel Aviv University, and "Shalem" College; and as a research fellow at JISS – Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security. She served as a Deputy Editor of the "Jerusalem Strategic Tribune", a journal for strategic and diplomatic affairs; as a Neubauer Research Associate at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv (INSS); and as the Director of International Programs at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies.Pnina received her BA and MA, specialising in Strategy and National Security at the Political Science department at Bar Ilan University. Her doctoral dissertation, also written at the Political Science Department of Bar Ilan University, focuses on the perception of the democratic society as sensitive to casualties and its impact on dealing with strategic threats through comparative analysis between Britain, Israel, and the United States.
- Visiting Fellows
Dr Charlie Knight is a Bithell Fellow at the Institute of Languages, Cultures, and Societies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He completed his PhD entitled ‘German-Jewish Letters and the Holocaust, 1933-45’ at the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton in 2025. He has received funding from the Wolfson Foundation and the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. He is the author of numerous articles on German-Jewish and Holocaust history, is co-editor (with Barnabas Balint) of the special issue ‘Transnational Holocaust Studies in History and Memory’ in Holocaust Studies, and is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Holocaust Letters: Methodologies, Cases, and Reflections (Bloomsbury, 2026).While at Sussex, Charlie will work with our German-Jewish archival collections to develop a new research project exploring the materiality and memory of German-Jewish migration. His work will involve surveying the archive to gain insight into the diverse ways German-Jewish individuals engaged in life-writing practices—both contemporaneous and retrospective—as a means of processing, documenting, and making sense of their migratory experiences.
Prof Daniel Siemens is Professor of European History at Newcastle University/UK. He is a historian of modern Europe with a special focus on twentieth-century Germany and its transnational and global entanglements. He has published widely on European and transatlantic history, incl. Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017). In 2023/24 Daniel was a Fellow at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS) in Jerusalem, leading the international research group “Paying for the Past: Reparations after the Holocaust in Global Context” with Iris Nachum and Gideon Reuveni. He is currently working on and co-leads a project on the global history of the United Restitution Organisation (URO), a Jewish legal aid organisation founded in London in 1948.
While at Sussex, Daniel will give a talk about Prof Gideon Reuveni's latest book, a biography of the German-Jewish photographer Fred Stein (1909-1967) which will be published in March 2026, and will work on a chapter for the forthcoming about the history of URO, focussing on the offices this organisation had in the US, Canada and South America from the 1950s onwards.
Sharon Livneh is the Deputy Director of the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem, where she also serves as co-editor of the Institute’s scholarly journal Chidushim: Studies in the Renewal of Jewish Life in Israel and the Diaspora. In addition to her role at the LBI, she is a Teaching Associate at the Schechter Institute for Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, where she lectures on Jewish thought, German-Jewish history, and Israeli-German relations. Her academic work focuses on the complex and evolving relationship between Germany and Israel in the post-Holocaust era. Sharon has published widely on topics including restitution and memory politics, educational diplomacy, and transnational dialogue.
While at Sussex, Sharon will continue her research on the Jewish Society for Human Service, an initiative launched by publisher Victor Gollancz in 1948 aimed at providing relief to Palestinian refugees. She will also assist in organising a workshop later next year focused on the intertwined histories and relationships between Germany, Israel, and Palestine. - Affiliated Fellows
- Current Postgraduate Researchers
Nina Hirshorn
Matt Marks
Samuel Ogden
Yael Roberts
Simon Williams
Learn more about our current postgraduate researchers' PhD projects.
- Past Postgraduate Researchers
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Stefan Boberg
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Florian Zabransky
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- Administrative Members
Tiffany Murphy -- Senior Weidenfeld Coordinator
- Advisory Board
The Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies is supported by the Advisory Board:
Michael Blake -- Chair
Yvonne Crampin -- Hon Secretary
Peter Daniel
Jeanne Katz
Lucy Hooberman
Nicole Horn
Sylvia Kahn Freund
Ann Stanton
Peter Summerfield -- Hon Solicitor