College of Arts and Sciences

Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies  

monika riceCongratulations to Seton Hall University's Catholic Studies faculty member Dr. Monika Rice! Dr. Rice has been awarded the Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies,

This fellowships is for post-doctoral candidates around the world conducting Holocaust research. Kagan Fellowships are awarded to outstanding candidates who exhibit strong personal commitment to Holocaust research, demonstrate excellence in academic achievement, and possess the potential to provide outstanding professional leadership that will shape the future of Holocaust scholarship.

Dr. Monika Rice research it titled, Postwar Identities of Polish-Jewish Doctors in Communist Poland.

This research concerns the postwar self-identification of medical doctors of Jewish origin in Poland. By examining personal narratives (especially, in memoirs, diaries and letters), It will elucidate how and why Polish-Jewish physicians created and expressed religious, social, cultural, and political identities for themselves in communist Poland after experiencing the Shoah.

The goal of the research is to disclose the varied layers of the expression of these self-identities, so as to contribute to the cultural history of physicians as a subset of the Polish-Jewish intelligentsia. Dr. Rice will achieve this goal by focusing on a micro history of those Polish-Jewish doctors whose personal documents or other traces of self-identification in postwar Poland lend themselves to investigation.

This research will thus be based on primary sources, principally, the personal documents (diaries, memoirs, or letters) left by Polish-Jewish physicians. Some of these sources have been published; others exist only as archived manuscripts. She will research these archival records on-site at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the Central Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw, and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Dr. Rice earned her Ph.D. in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University and her M.A. and B.A. in Cultural Anthropology at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland. She teaches the course Modern Women of Faith in Catholic Studies and also teaches in Jewish-Christian Studies, including Catholic-Jewish Dialogue on the Holocaust: A Catholic Perspective.

Before teaching at Seton Hall University, Dr. Rice was a Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellow in Advanced Shoah Studies, an Albert Abramson Fellow in Holocaust Studies, and a Ruth Ann & Nathan Perlmutter Fellow.