The Shatzmiller Graduate Fellows honor Emeritus Smart Professor Joseph Shatzmiller, who taught at Duke University from 1994 to 2010. Among his many publications, he is best known for Shylock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending, and Medieval Society and Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society. Fellowships offer advanced graduate students the opportunity to engage with prominent national and international scholars in Jewish Studies visiting the seminar and to connect with the Jewish Studies faculty active in the seminar. Fellows receive a research stipend and a seminar session devoted to their work.
2026-27 Shatzmiller Fellows
Kinsey Kaiser is a first year Public History Graduate student at NC State University with a focus on Jewish Studies. Originally from Blythewood, South Carolina and she holds a Bachelor's in History from the University of South Carolina. Her undergraduate thesis was on how canonically Jewish Marvel comic characters have had their depictions altered from text to screen and how these changes have overall affected Jewish representation within the media. Her career goal is to work in Collections within a museum following her two year program.
Emily Williams is a PhD student in American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She holds a BA in fine arts and history from Haverford College and an MFA in photography from Louisiana State University. After earning her MFA, she served as a curatorial fellow at The Do Good Fund in Columbus, Georgia. Her current work, titled We had to know who we were; We had to know who we weren't documents Jewish communities past and present in the rural and small-town Deep South through photography and oral history interviews. She has received support from the Southern Jewish Historical Society, Texas Jewish Historical Society, the Alabama Folklife Association, the Texas State Historical Association, and the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies.