Speaker Bios
John Contreni
Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Purdue University
John Contreni is the Justin S. Morrill Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. He received his Ph.D. degree in August 1971, from Michigan State University and joined Purdue's Department of History the following month. He teaches the introductory medieval history survey course and offers undergraduate courses on the World of Charlemagne, Medieval Culture, and Studies in Medieval History. Graduate seminars focus on late antiquity and the Carolingian age. His research explores the intellectual, religious, and political culture of the early medieval period (fifth to eleventh centuries) with special emphasis on the manuscripts, schools, and texts of Carolingian Europe.
He has served as head of the Department of History (1985-1997) and dean of the Graduate School (2002-2006). A member of the inaugural cohort of faculty members enrolled in Purdue's Book of Great Teachers (1999), he is also an elected fellow of the Medieval Academy of America (2003).
Faculty Website
Peter Fritzsche
Writer and Scholar
Professor Fritzsche specializes in modern German and European history and is a former Guggenheim and Humboldt Fellow. Professor Fritzsche's current research focuses on comparative questions of memory and identity and vernacular uses of the past in modern Europe. His most recent books are Life and Death in the Third Reich (2008), Nietzsche and the Death of God (2007), and Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (2004); his other publications include Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (1990); A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (1992); Reading Berlin 1900 (1996); and Germans into Nazis (1998). With Charles C. Stewart, he edited Imagining the Twentieth Century (1997). Peter Fritzsche received his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986. He is currently at work on "the twentieth-century lives of Franz von Goll, graphomaniac."
Faculty Website
Sarah Powley
Educator, English Department Chair, McCutcheon High School
Sarah Powley is the English Department Chair at McCutcheon High School in Lafayette, Indiana, and the High School Language Arts Chair for the Tippecanoe School Corporation. She has taught in the Tippecanoe School Corporation for 27 years. Sarah co-sponsors The International Club, an extra-curricular program that provides cross-cultural learning experiences and opportunities to participate in international service projects.
Sarah served as a consultant in the development of curriculum materials for The Children of Willesden Lane. She has made numerous presentations on teaching this book at national conferences and at Indiana Department of Education workshops. In 2006, Sarah was the recipient of a Lilly Teacher Creativity Fellowship Award to study the causes of the Rwandan genocide and to compare the events in Rwanda with the Holocaust and other genocides of the 20th century. She traveled to Rwanda in 2006; since then, she has written about the pattern of genocide and, with her students, presented a workshop for educators at the 2007 Greater Lafayette Holocaust Remembrance Conference.
She is a graduate of DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, and completed her M.S. in English Education at Purdue University. She was the 1992 Indiana Teacher of the Year, Runner-Up. In 1993, she received the Milken Family Foundation National Educator Award for Teaching Excellence. In 2002, she was the recipient of the Crystal Apple Award from the School of Education at Purdue University.
Kevin Gartenhaus
Writer and Scholar
Kevin Gartenhaus is one of two sons of two Jewish German immigrants that escaped the Nazis and came to the United States back at the beginning of World War II. Thanks to his Mother's and Father's flight to freedom in Chicago and Philadelphia respectively, Kevin has had the good fortune to thrive in the United States without even a hint of the tremendous difficulties both of his parents experienced during their childhood years in Nazi Germany. After growing up in the shadow of Purdue University, where his father was and still is a Physics Professor, Kevin graduated from Purdue University with a B.S. in Applied Math in 1980 and then from Indiana University with an MBA in Marketing in 1986. For the past 25 plus years, Kevin has worked for information technology and business consulting firms. He has held regional and national positions at Fortune 100 companies like Ameritech and IBM, and he has also worked for highly successful local organizations. Kevin's more recent work experience includes over 12 years of information technology staffing, recruiting and consulting work for a number of companies including a company he founded himself in 2004 called IT Spire. Kevin grew IT Spire to 25 employees and $3M in annual revenues within its first three years, before selling the company to his current employer, Surrex Solutions Corporation which is headquartered in California. At Surrex, Kevin serves as the Managing Director for four offices in Indiana and Ohio. Kevin also serves in leadership roles on a number of not-for-profit boards including College Mentors for Kids, and Family Development Services, the Indianapolis Head Start Organization, where he serves as Board President. In addition to his work and community activities, Kevin is dedicated to his wife Kelly and their three wonderful children, Matthew, Zachary, and Lauren.
Johanna Weisz Gartenhaus
Survivor
Johanna Gartenhaus fled Germany with her mother 6 months after Kristallnacht; With the borders closed at the time, she had a harrowing experience being smuggled over the Dutch border. She lived in Amsterdam from June 1939 until taking a boat to the USA in December 1939. She is an active member of Hadassah, and Sisterhood Sons of Abraham. She has lived in Lafayette for the past 50 years with her husband, Sol. They have two sons and 5 grandcildren.
Mitch Braff
Executive Director, Jewish Partisan Education Foundation
Mr. Mitch Braff, Executive Director of the Jewish Partisan Education Foundation in San Francisco, CA, will speak on the topic of the Jewish resistance during WWII. Mr. Braff is a documentary filmmaker in San Francisco who founded the Jewish Partisan Education Foundation (JPEF) to tell the story of the 20,000-30,000 European Jews who escaped the ghettos and death camps and joined partisan groups that resisted and sabotaged the Germans and their collaborators. JPEF, with offices also in New Jersey, develops curricula on the Jewish partisans used by thousands of educator across the country. Mr. Braff has produced nine films on the subject and served as an advisor to the recently-released Paramount Vantage production, Defiance . Mr. Braff will also present a workshop for teachers on March 30 entitled "Teaching about the Jewish Partisans of WWII."
Jewish Partisan Educational FoundationJoseph Haberer
Survivor, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Purdue University
Joseph Haberer left Germany on the first Kindertransport to England in December 1938 and lived in England until 1946, when he emigrated to the United States. He is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Purdue University, Director Emeritus of the Purdue Jewish Studies Program and Founding Editor of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. He is also the President of the Midwest Chapter of the Kindertransport Association (KTA).
Fritz Cohen
Survivor, Purdue Alumni
Fritz Cohen was born in 1922 in Hannover, Germany, and lived in Ronnenberg during most of his youth. His family emigrated to the United States in 1938 where he graduated from high school in 1940. He served with the 15th USAAF in North Africa and Italy during World War II, and was discharged in October 1945. He received the Italian Campaign Ribbon and two Bronze Battle Stars for his military service. He earned his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Iowa, and joined the faculty of Purdue University in 1958. He is Professor Emeritus of German literature at Purdue.
