Associated Faculty and Center Staff

Brad Austin received his PhD in history from Ohio State University. He is currently the secondary education coordinator for the history department, where he also teaches a variety of US history, world history, and pedagogy classes. He published Democratic Sports: Men's and Women's College Sports During the Great Depression (University of Arkansas Press, 2015) and has co-edited Understanding and Teaching the Vietnam War(University of Wisconsin Press, 2013). He is a series editor for the University of Wisconsin Press's Harvey Goldberg Series for Understanding and Teaching History. In 2012, the Northeastern Council of Graduate Studies awarded Brad the Graduate Studies Teaching Award.

Born in Varna, Bulgaria and educated at the local French Gymnasium “Frédéric Joliot-Curie,” Dr. Kitanov moved to Finland, where he received his MA and doctorate of theology from the University of Helsinki. In addition to serving as full-time philosophy department faculty at Salem State University, he has also taught philosophy classes at Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, and Gordon College, Wenham, MA. His specialty is philosophy of religion and theological ethics with a particular focus on medieval scholastic theology and philosophy. He is also passionate about paleography (the study of ancient and medieval handwriting), and the critical editing of Medieval Latin theological and philosophical texts. He has published on ethics in international and national journals and presented at numerous conferences.

Christopher Mauriello received a PhD in history from Brown University. He is currently director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a professor in the history department at Salem State University. He served as department chair of history from 2008-2013. He specializes in modern European history and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in contemporary European history, German History, Nazism, WWI and WII and the Holocaust. He is author of the recently published Forced Confrontation: The Politics of Dead Bodies in Germany at the End of World War II (Lexington Books, 2017) and is co-author of From Boston to Berlin: A Journey Through WWII in Images and Words (Purdue, 2001). He has also authored numerous articles and presented papers at national and international conferences.

Professor McAndrews received his Ph.D. in social science from Syracuse University and a J.D. from New England Law|Boston with a concentration in international law. He is a founding member of the CHGS and serves on the Executive Board. Dr. McAndrews is a professor of social work and teaches graduate courses on human rights, refugee/asylum law, comparative genocides, social policy, human diversity and community practice. He is an attorney with a specialization in immigration and asylum law, representing refugees from war-torn countries around the world. Dr. McAndrews is a liaison in the U.S. for the El Salvadoran based human rights organization, the ProBusqueda Association, whose mission is to investigate the abductions of children during the civil war in order to assist in their reunification with their families and to work to bring perpetrators to trial. Dr. McAndrews has been the lead faculty member for student trips to El Salvador, and he has been instrumental in developing the Center’s student trips to Rwanda. Dr. McAndrews plays an active role with numerous legal and community organizations for the purpose of advocating for the rights of immigrants and refugees. His research interests are in the areas of post-war transitional justice processes and human rights advocacy.

Eric Metchik received his PhD in psychology from Yale University. He is a professor of criminal justice and former department chair at Salem State University. His main areas of interest are community corrections, technology and the criminal justice system and the motivations and mentality of Holocaust perpetrators. He has been awarded fellowships from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy and the Whiting Foundation for travel to Israel to study anti-terrorism techniques and Poland for Holocaust-related research. Current research interests also include the design of mentoring programs for at-risk youth and the relationship between college students' service-learning and academic retention and success, supported by a Vision Grant from the Boston Foundation.

Steven Silvern is a cultural/political geographer whose research has focused on the spatial and cultural politics of Native Americans. He has written extensively on Native treaty rights and explored the spatial and racist ideologies of the anti-Indian sovereignty movement. He is also interested in place and memory as it relates to genocide and the Shoah.

• • • As Faculty Research Associate for the SSU Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Professor in the English Department, Professor Young joined the faculty of Salem State in the fall of 2008. She is also the Graduate Coordinator for the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Certificate program. She completed her M.A. and PhD in Comparative Literature at the State University of New York, Binghamton, and earned her BA in Art History from California State University, Long Beach. She has also studied the practice of photography. She has published widely. Her current book project, The Forensics of Memorialization, is about the "forensic imagination," and how traumatic material culture is used to create visual narratives that shape memory politics in post-conflict former Yugoslavia. She is also engaged in several other projects including a photo/text essay about forensics, material culture and border politics at the U.S./Mexico border, and a multimedia project with artist Vladimir Miladinovic about evidence and its absence at mass grave sites created during the 1990s wars in former Yugoslavia. She has presented her research throughout the United States and in many international locations throughout Europe and Latin America.

With Dr. Paul Lowe (University of the Arts, London) she co-organizes the annual conference, Why Remember? Memory and Forgetting in Times of War and Its Aftermath, in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. With Dr. Liliana Gomez-Popescu (University of Zurich) she co-organizes the workshop meetings of the group "Remains, Ruins, Landscapes". 

In her role as a Faculty Research Associate for the CHGS, her responsibilities include co-organizing the "Research Conversations" series and international outreach. She also sits on the CHGS Executive Board as a voting member. 

Regina Kazyulina, Program Research Associate

Regina Kazyulina was born in Ukraine. After immigrating to the United States, Regina lived and studied in the Boston area. She received her Ph.D. from Northeastern University in 2018. Regina has previously taught courses in Modern European and Russian history at Northeastern University, Boston Architectural College, and Bates College. Her research focuses on the Eastern Front during World War Two and the gendered lived experiences of civilians on German-occupied territory.

Lynn Blayer, Program Assistant

Lynn Blayer has been with Salem State University since 2006, in roles within the School of Education. Currently she is the Program Assistant with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.