Dr. Willa Witherow-Culpepper is an early career scholar holding a PhD and MSc from Rutgers University Newark, a joint MA from Kingston University, Collegium Civitas Warsaw, and Universita degli Studi di Siena, and a BA from City University London. Her Master's thesis asked "What Role Does Folklore Play in the Mobilization of Public Support and Participation in Genocide" focusing on post-war pogroms in Poland and oral poetry in the Balkans, extending her work on narrative and memory to an application of perfomance theory to transitional justic mechanisms in her PhD dissertation. "The Motive & the Cue: The Construction of Perpetrators and Mass Violence through the Language of International Criminal Tribunals" used qualitative coding of court documents from the Nuremberg Military Tribunal, International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia to analyze the role of mid-level perpetrators and civil structures in mass violence. Her dissertation was nominated for the Graduate School Newark's 2025 Outstanding Dissertation Award, and she was a finalist at the Rutgers' round of the 3 Minute Thesis tournament, winning the audience vote. She has experience teaching across diverse age groups and institutions, including the New Jersey Department of Corrections program assisting incarcerated individuals in obtaining college degrees, and has presented at workshops and conferences in the UK, US, Armenia, Cambodia, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Bosnia, Spain and Hungary. 

Research Interests

• Mass violence
• Ethnic cleansing
• Civil conflict
• Memory
• Narrative
• Education
• Transitional justice
• Performance theory
• Far-right political extremism
• Folklore
• Politics of representation