Affiliated Students and Scholars

Daniel Miehling

Germanic Studies Affiliate

Daniel Miehling is a postdoctoral researcher at Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA), specializing in the dissemination of misinformation, contemporary antisemitism, and conspiracy fantasies on social media. His interdisciplinary research integrates computational social science, linguistics, and empirical social research to investigate the dynamics of political communication through user-generated content. Dr. Miehling holds a Ph.D. in General Linguistics from the Technical University of Berlin and has contributed to the understanding of digital discourse and online radicalization. His dissertation, Understanding Online Antisemitism: Hate Speech in Web 2.0, was published by Nomos in 2024, and his other works can be found through his portfolio. His current research focuses on developing new methodologies to address challenges in studying online media.

David Axelrod

Ph.D. Student

Having a background in history, David is integrating research questions from history and STS with complex systems and network science approaches. Key areas of interest include information diffusion, contagions in social networks, and the dynamics of online prejudice.

Hannah Benchik

Graduate Student

Hannah Benchik is a Master of Library Science student specializing in Archives and Records Management and Rare Books and Manuscripts. Her studies focus on books and archives from the Holocaust and WWII-era Germany. Last year, Hannah worked at the Museum of German Books and Writing and the Archive of Exiled Germans, 1933-1945 at the German National Library in Leipzig, Germany. She has also done archival work for the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, Poland. This past summer, she was a 2022 Museum Director’s Laureate for the “If Not for Those Ten...” award, given to ten of the most outstanding volunteers, interns, and coordinators at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum out of a pool of nearly 500.

Grace C. Bland

Research Assistant

Grace Bland is currently pursuing an MS in Cybersecurity Risk Management at Indiana University. She joined ISCA as a Program Assistant in August 2022 and has since helped organize the 2023 Datathon Competition and the 2023 Beinner Family Speaker Series. She currently works as a research assistant for Professors Rosenfeld and Jikeli.

Rhonda K Fischer

Research Assistant

Rhonda provides data science support after completing graduate research with ISCA. She is a Data Scientist and Project Manager within the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering and a member of the Crisis Technologies Innovation Lab.

Weejeong Jeong

Ph.D. Candidate

Weejeong Jeong is a Ph.D. candidate in Curriculum and Instruction in the School of Education at Indiana University. She also received M.S. in Applied Statistics, and M.S.Ed. in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education. Her research interests include quantitative research in language education, academic literacy development, and language pedagogy for English/Korean as a foreign language. She has joined ISCA since 2020 and has conducted data sampling, cleaning, descriptive, and inferential statistical analysis.

Günther Jikeli

Associate Director, Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism

Erna B. Rosenfeld Associate Professor for the Study of Antisemitism

Associate Professor in the Borns Jewish Studies Program and Germanic Studies

gjikeli@indiana.edu
(812) 856-1150
Global and International Studies Building 3121

Sameer Karali

Research Assistant

skarali@iu.edu

Sameer Karali graduated from Indiana University Bloomington, Luddy School of Informatics with a Master of Science in informatics. Mr. Karali obtained his Bachelor of Science in Informatics degree from Indiana University Kokomo. His focuses are on data analysis and cleaning data. His previous published researches were about cleaning data entitled Approximate Quality Assessment with Sampling Approaches and the other one entitled Comparative Analysis of Sampling Methods for Data Quality Assessment. Mr. Karali has experience in scraping and modeling data as well as in robotics.

His published works include:

- Liu, H., Sang, Z., & Karali, S. (2019, December). Approximate quality assessment with sampling approaches. In 2019 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI) (pp. 1306-1311). IEEE.

- Karali, S., Liu, H., & Kim, J. (2021). Comparative Analysis of Sampling Methods for Data Quality Assessment. In Advances in Data Science and Information Engineering (pp. 809-821). Springer, Cham.

Kayden Poindexter

Graduate Student

Kayden Poindexter graduated from Indiana University in 2023 with degrees in Criminal Justice and French, and she is currently pursuing her JD. She has been involved in ISCA's research on antisemitism on social media since 2021, having joined with a background in studying cyber crimes against children. She has now assisted ISCA in analyzing thousands of tweets and has given numerous presentations across IU's campus about antisemitic hate speech on social media.

Sophie von Máriássy

Undergraduate Student (Potsdam University)

Sophie von Máriássy is currently completing her Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Jewish Studies at Potsdam University. In the past, she studied at Tel Aviv University as well as working on the project “United in Diversity” at The Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies. In 2020 she was on the winning team of the Datathon/ Hackathon of Indiana University on antisemitism on Twitter. Since fall 2020 she has been working on the Decoding Antisemitism project on English as well as German tweets.
Besides antisemitism on online platforms such as Twitter, her interests lie in the recent history of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry.

Ayush Sanghavi

Graduate Student

Ayush is from Mumbai, India, and has pursued his Bachelor’s in Engineering majoring in Information Technology. He is currently a Graduate student in Computer Science at IU. Ayush believes in perseverance and is a result-oriented individual. He is always ready to seek new challenges that come his way. Ayush’s interests include traveling, hiking, playing tennis, and cricket.

Clara Schilling

Graduate Student (University of Oldenburg)

Clara Schilling is currently studying for a master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Oldenburg. She holds a bachelors's degree in North American Studies and Philosophy from the University of Göttingen. Besides annotating tweets and researching current manifestations of antisemitism as well as psychoanalytic theory, she regularly organizes film screenings at a local cinema.

Katharina Soemer

Project Manager

ksoemer@iu.edu

Katharina Soemer holds an MA in Sociology and Social Research with a focus on quantitative methods from the University of Bremen, Germany, where she also studied Computer Science. She joined the research team in 2020 and has worked in different areas of the team since then. She started with Tweet annotation, was then responsible for statistical analysis, and now manages the project which still includes data analysis and research data management. Drawing on her methodological background, Katharina's academic research focuses on questions at the intersection of machine learning and antisemitism/hate speech. For her master's thesis, she explored ways to ensure annotation reliability for social data such as online antisemitism and analyzed methodological approaches to classify borderline cases. In 2022, she was invited to Bloomington as a visiting scholar and became familiar with Indiana and the Midwest. She currently lives in Berlin, Germany. In addition to her academic work on the topic, she gives lectures and workshops on antisemitism on social media to teachers, students, and the general public. Read more...

Jenna Solomon

Research Assistant

Jenna Solomon graduated from Indiana University in 2019 where she majored in Jewish Studies with a double minor in Hebrew and Israel Studies. She has been involved in the ISCA's research on antisemitism on social media since 2017 when she participated in a course on contemporary antisemitism that was a part of the US State Department's Diplomacy Lab Initiative. She has since then annotated thousands of tweets and helped organize the ISCA's 2020 summer Datathon/Hackathon. Outside of her research with the ISCA, she also manages the institute's social media pages. When she is not documenting antisemitism on social media, she spends most of her time at the local ice rink in Bloomington as the director of their Skating School and as a private coach.

Victor Tschiskale

Graduate Student (Center for the Research of Antisemitism in Berlin)

Victor Tschiskale is a graduate student at the Center for the Research of Antisemitism in Berlin. In addition to his involvement with the Research Lab, he is working on the research project Decoding Antisemitism. His interests lie in the occurrence of Antisemitism in the context of Internet (sub)cultures, as well as finding ways to counter it.

Affiliated Students and Scholars