Ruthie Research Scholar Panel

In 2026, MCHE awarded Ruthie Research Grants to two exciting young scholars: Danielle M. Lucksted, PhD candidate in Sociology at Stony Brook University, and Maverick Huneycutt, PhD candidate in History at the University of South Carolina. Lucksted’s research explores public history and memorialization of difficult pasts, both of the Holocaust and of racial violence in the U.S., and Huneycutt’s project uses research on both the Holocaust and slavery in the American South to think through complicit figures of “coerced internal authority” across these spaces and histories.

For this third cycle of the Ruthie Research Grant, both scholars will present highlights from their own individual research, and then participate in a panel discussion emphasizing the importance and richness of the comparative lens both their projects work within. The panel will be moderated by MCHE’s Dr. Melissa Karp.

To make use of a comparative research framework in Holocaust studies, as these projects do, is not to suggest a competitive model that relativizes suffering. Instead, this framework asks us to consider the patterns that exist between incidents of mass violence, genocide, fascism, and memorialization across different historical and geographic contexts. Putting Holocaust histories into conversation with these other events produces generative, trailblazing research that brings different fields into dialogue, pushing us to continue to think about the echoes of the Holocaust in our own time.

This program will be held via Zoom.

Ruthie Abend Krigel Tivol was born in Dubienka, Poland in 1929. In December 1938, Ruthie, her sister, and mother joined her father who had immigrated to Kansas City several years earlier. Ruthie always understood how fortunate her family was to escape WWII and the Holocaust. She never forgot those who were left behind.

As an ardent supporter of MCHE, Ruthie created a legacy — including the Ruthie Tivol Graduate Research Fund which supports scholars conducting graduate research on the Holocaust or a related subject.