by emoryhistorydept

Rosalyn Page: In Memoriam


The Emory History Department mourns the death of Rosalyn Page, who served as the department administrator for more than 25 years before her retirement in 2008. Becky Herring, current department administrator, writes that Rosalyn was “not only a patient and encouraging mentor, she was also a loyal and supportive friend. Her fun-loving spirit, joyful nature, and kind heart will be greatly missed by her loving family and cherished friends.” A funeral service will be held on Thursday, March 12, 2026, at 1:30 pm in Glenn Memorial UMC’s Little Chapel at Emory University in Atlanta. In remembrance, consider a donation to WABE or Friends of Disabled Adults and Children.

Rosalyn’s obituary, chronicling her rich life and character, follows:

Rosalyn Florence Page, beloved mother, sister, aunt and cherished friend, passed away peacefully in Tucker, Georgia, on February 16, 2026, at the age of 82, surrounded by her family and those she held dear.

Born on April 25, 1943, in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, Rosalyn was the first daughter of Joe E. Page and Cora Jane Page. She spent her childhood in Bristow, Oklahoma, and later in Englewood, Colorado, where she developed the curiosity, independence, and love of learning that would shape her life. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Colorado State University, an accomplishment she carried with pride.

Rosalyn married Mike Phillips, and together they raised two children while living in Colorado, Kansas, and ultimately Stone Mountain, Georgia.  Whether substitute teaching, cheering at countless ball games or savoring summer camping, Rosalyn poured her heart into the moment.  Her devotion to her children was unwavering, and she nurtured them with the same warmth, humor, and optimism she offered to everyone she met.

She retired in 2008 from Emory University in Atlanta, where she served for more than 25 years as an Academic Department Administrator in the History Department. Rosalyn found fulfillment in her work, forming lasting friendships with colleagues and students who admired her intelligence, steadiness, and generous spirit.

A woman of many passions, Rosalyn was a longtime member of Glenn Memorial Methodist Church and an enthusiastic participant in the Atlanta Cajun Zydeco Association, where she embraced her love of dance and community. Known for her cheery smile, kindness, and unwaveringly positive outlook, she had a remarkable ability to make others feel seen, valued, and loved — and she never let them forget it.

Rosalyn was a lifelong reader with an insatiable thirst for knowledge, a talented cook and patient seamstress.  She was a dedicated student of the French language, enjoyed yoga and genealogy.  She was a treasured friend to all who knew her. Her presence brought light, laughter, and comfort, and her absence will be felt deeply.

She is survived by her daughter Lisa Phillips (Mike Owens) of Brevard, North Carolina; her son Trace A. Phillips (Jen Moran) of Edwards, Colorado; her sister Melissa Page (Hugh Simpson) of Los Lunas, New Mexico; and her former husband Mike Phillips (Susanne Pinkley) of Alpharetta, Georgia. Rosalyn is also remembered with love by many extended family members and countless friends whose lives she touched.  Her memory will continue to inspire those who were fortunate enough to know her.

by emoryhistorydept

Kreklau (PhD, ’18) Publishes Article in ‘German History’


Doctoral alum Claudia Kreklau, Honorary Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of St Andrews, has published a new article in the journal German History. Titled “Vaterland, c.1780–1870,” the piece examines the multiple and shifting meanings of the German-language term meaning “fatherland.” The full abstract follows:

This article analyses the changing semiotics of the term Vaterland between 1780 and 1870 in a variety of German-language discussions by reconstructing specific instances of meaning. It finds that the term Vaterland held multiple meanings due to the range of religious, philosophic and political frameworks and historical frames of reference in which this term operated. A great variety of speakers produced and exercised meanings synchronically and modified them diachronically. Far from being synonymous with better-studied terms such as Germany or Volk, Vaterland meant something different in every instance of usage—and reflected contestations for the fatherland itself in the period examined here.

Kreklau recently published her first book, The Making of Modern Eating: How the German Middle Class Forged the Way We Eat, 1780-1910, with Berghahn Books. She completed her PhD in 2018 under the advisement of Dr. Brian Vick.

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Lena Oak Suk (PhD, ’14) Publishes ‘In the Darkness of the Cinema’


Doctoral program alum Dr. Lena Oak Suk (PhD, ’14) has published her first book, In the Darkness of the Cinema: Gender and Moviegoing in Early Twentieth-Century Urban Brazil, with Pittsburgh University Press. Focused on the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Suk’s work offers an innovative analysis of how movies and moviegoers reshaped gendered perceptions and gendered realities in urban Brazil at the beginning of the last century. Rielle Navitski (University of Georgia) praises In the Darkness of the Cinema as “an engaging account of how the movies transformed urban space and women’s participation in public life in Brazil.”

Suk is a research affiliate at the Institute of Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and Assistant Director of Investigator Skill-Building in the Office of the Vice President for Research, Scholarship & Creative Endeavor at UT. She completed her graduate training under the advisement of Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History.

Read the abstract of Suk’s monograph below, and find more information on Pittsburgh UP’s book page.

Gender and sexual morality, and their intersections with race and class, were central to the formation of urban Brazil in the twentieth century. In the Darkness of the Cinema takes a wide-ranging and innovative approach to gender and moviegoing culture in Brazilian society. By focusing on the flirtations and romances of the movie theater, as well as the intrigue and moral panic that they caused, Suk creates a rich portrait of spectatorship. Where women went to the movies, who they met, and what they did in the darkness were key questions that brewed among overlapping but disparate circles, from film intellectuals and filmmakers to legislators and public health officials, as well as the moviegoers themselves. Amassing sources located traditionally within film culture as well as outside of it, such as film magazines, interviews, comics, literature, and songs, Suk shows that movie theaters and moviegoers made an indelible mark on the urban landscapes of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

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Craig Perry (PhD, ’14) Publishes ‘Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History’


Doctoral program alumnus Dr. Craig Perry has published his first monograph, Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History, with Princeton University Press. Perry’s book reconstructs the social history of slavery in Cairo at a pivotal period in the city’s history, showing how the slave trade and slavery shaped everyday life, state diplomacy, and the formation Jewish and Arab-Islamic culture.

Dr. Arnold Franklin, Associate Professor at Queens College, City University of New York, describes Perry’s book as “a major contribution to historians’ understanding of one of the most pervasive and consequential institutions in the medieval Islamic world.” David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor Emeritus at Emory, describes the work as “a brilliant reconstruction of slavery and slaveowners in the Jewish community of medieval Cairo drawing on the vast but highly fragmentary records of a synagogue.”

Perry received his doctorate in 2014. He is assistant professor in the Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies Department at Emory. Read the full abstract of Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt below and find more on the Princeton UP book page.

In this book, Craig Perry mines a remarkable cache of fragmentary documents preserved in an Egyptian synagogue to write a new history of slavery and the slave trade in the medieval Middle East. These documents—which range from the everyday correspondence of traveling merchants to legal queries sent to Jewish jurists—provide the richest surviving archive for the social history of slavery during the centuries when Cairo was an imperial and commercial capital at the intersection of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. Perry draws on this archive, known as the Cairo Geniza, to shed new light on such crucial topics as the slave trade in state diplomacy, the entanglements of gender and household slavery, and the lives of the enslaved.

Perry chronicles a protean slave trade that trafficked enslaved people from Europe, Africa, and India to the Egyptian market. His account cuts across different scales of analysis, from the macro-level of imperial rule to the micro-level of the family kitchen. Along the way, he upends the traditional story of Passover; medieval Jews, he writes, could explain slavery to their children by pointing to the enslaved people who served the holiday meal. When freed, some former slaves converted to Judaism and became the parents of Jewish children. Perry’s narrative reveals a world, long hidden from historians, in which enslaved people made their way through the alleys of Cairo, toiled in the workshops of apothecaries, and found ways to evade the surveillance of their owners. With this book, Perry writes enslaved people into the social and economic life of medieval Islamic society.

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Camille Goldmon (PhD, ’22) Publishes ‘Black HiSTORIES’ Series on TikTok and IG


Dr. Camille Goldmon (PhD, ’22), Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, is publishing a series of stories on Instagram and TikTok for Black History Month. Titled “Black HiSTORIES,” the series broaches topics ranging from early efforts by Carter G. Woodson to celebrate Black history to the lives and work of seminal figures like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Fannie Lou Hamer.

Goldmon’s research centers on twentieth-century United States history, Southern history, and agrarianism. She completed her dissertation, “On the Right Side of Radicalism: African American Farmers, Tuskegee Institute, and Agrarian Radicalism in the Alabama Black Belt, 1881–1940,” in 2022 under the advisement of Dr. Carol Anderson.

Find the series via her handle camigoldmon on Instagram and TikTok.

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Claudia Kreklau (PhD, ’18) Publishes ‘The Making of Modern Eating’


Dr. Claudia Kreklau, an alumnus of the Emory history doctoral program, has published The Making of Modern Eating: How the German Middle Class Forged the Way We Eat, 1780-1910 with Berghahn Books. In this, her first monograph, Kreklau traces the origins of modern foodways and culinary practices in central Europe in the nineteenth century and explores how an array of individuals expressed self-understandings through food.

Jim Brophy, Francis H. Squire Professor of History at the University of Delaware, describes The Making of Modern Eating as “a tour de force that promises to be a field-defining work.” Kreklau, he continues, is “a historian with a capacious and bold historical imagination…a rising star in our field.”

Kreklau is Honorary Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of St Andrews, and she is the three-time prize-winning author of seven academic articles. She completed her PhD in 2018 under the advisement of Dr. Brian Vick.

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Wiggins’s ‘Black Excellence’ Named Finalist for AAIHS’s Pauli Murray Prize


The African-American Intellectual History Society has named the finalists for its annual Pauli Murray Book Prize, and Dr. Danielle Wiggins (PhD, ’18) was short-listed for her newly-published monograph Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). Named for pioneering lawyer, scholar, activist, and theorist Pauli Murray, the prize recognizes the best book concerning Black intellectual history published in the preceding year.

Described as a “provocative new history of modern black liberalism,” Black Excellence has already received notable praise. For instance, George Derek Musgrove, co-author of Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital, writes: “Beautifully written and wonderfully insightful, Black Excellence is a must read for anyone who wants to understand both the liberatory and disciplinary history of black liberalism in the post–civil rights era.”

Wiggins is Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown University. She completed under doctoral work under the advisement of Dr. Joe Crespino, Jimmy Carter Professor of History and Interim Dean of Emory College of Arts & Sciences.

Read the abstract of Black Excellence below, and learn more about the other nominees for the 2026 Murray prize.

Black Excellence offers a provocative new history of modern black liberalism by situating the seemingly conservative tendencies of black elected officials in the post–civil rights era within neoliberal American politics and an enduring black liberal tradition.

In the 1970s and ’80s, cities across the country elected black mayors for the first time. Just as these officials gained political power, however, their cities felt the full brunt of white flight and deindustrialization. Tasked with governing cities in crisis, black political leaders responded in seemingly conservative ways to the social problems that austerity worsened. Nowhere was this response more evident than in Atlanta. In the nation’s preeminent black urban regime, black leaders such as mayors Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young employed the power of policing and the private sector to discipline black Atlantans, hoping they would equip vulnerable communities with the tools to manage the volatility of the era.

Danielle Wiggins shows that these punitive responses to the problems of crime, family instability, and unemployment were informed by black liberalism’s disciplinary impulse: an enduring tendency to reform behaviors believed to threaten black survival in a white supremacist nation. Forged in response to the violence of Jim Crow, the disciplinary impulse relied upon notions of pathology and its inverse, black excellence. Wiggins identifies several black liberal efforts to cultivate excellent black communities, families, and workers in the post–civil rights era, including community policing, corporate-sponsored family initiatives, and black entrepreneurship.

In embracing disciplinary strategies, however, black liberals often focused on behavior at the expense of addressing structural inequality. Consequently, their approaches dovetailed with those of the “New” Democrats, whose post–Great Society social policies were informed by urban black liberals. Black Excellence reveals thus how urban black liberals not only reshaped black politics but, as Democrats, also helped build the neoliberal Democratic Party.

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Sanders Contextualizes Struggle Over MLK’s Legacy


Dr. Crystal R. Sanders, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently contributed analysis to the article: “Stevie Wonder’s Battle for MLK Day and the New Challenges to King’s Legacy.” Sanders helps to chronicle the critical role that prominent figures like Wonder played in securing the establishment of the federal holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., which was signed into law in 1983. Sanders also offers fascinating analysis of the struggle to get the holiday observed on state and local levels, including in her hometown of Clayton, North Carolina (see more on this below). A specialist in the twentieth-century history of the U.S., Sanders is the author, most recently, of the multiple prize-winning book A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs (UNC Press, 2024).

Read an excerpt from the Capital B News article below and find the full piece here.

“Whether we’re talking about the local, state, or federal level, it took a lot of maneuvering to get this holiday,” Sanders said.

She grew up in Clayton, a small North Carolina town about 15 or 20 minutes from Raleigh. She recalled how her father, the first Black American elected to the Clayton Town Council, basically had to trick the council into recognizing the holiday, even after North Carolina had adopted it as a state holiday in 1983.

“After several failed attempts at getting the holiday recognized, my father introduced a motion that the town would observe all holidays observed by North Carolina,” she said. “And many of his colleagues didn’t think twice. They voted in the affirmative. Later, during that same meeting, an elderly white man said, ‘Wait, did I just vote for the King holiday?’ And my father said, ‘You most certainly did.’”

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Lowery Delivers Remarks at Fourth Annual Muscogee Teach-In

Sarah Woods/Emory Photo/Video


Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, Emory Cahoon Family Professor of American History and a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, recently delivered remarks at the fourth installment of the annual Muscogee teach-in. The event brings representatives of the Muscogee Nation, displaced from the site of Emory’s campus in the early 1800s, to campus to teach Muscogee history and culture and to continue fortifying relationships with the Emory community. Since arriving at Emory in 2021, Lowery has been instrumental in building those relationships, including through programming at Emory’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies and curricular offerings in the History Department and beyond.

Lowery is the author of The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle (UNC Press, 2018) and Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (UNC Press, 2010). She has also produced Peabody Award-winning and Emmy-nominated films.

Read the Emory News Center’s full feature about the teach-in: “Muscogee Teach-in spotlights sovereignty, storytelling and dance.”

“The United States is on Indigenous land at all times…So, Native American and Indigenous studies is relevant to all of us.”

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Rogers Publishes ‘Ethanol: A Hemispheric History for the Future of Biofuels’ with Co-Author Manuel


Dr. Thomas D. Rogers, Professor of History with specializations in environmental and labor history, has published a new book with co-author Dr. Jeffrey T. Manuel (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville). Titled Ethanol: A Hemispheric History for the Future of of Biofuels, the book chronicles the transnational history of ethanol in Brazil and the U.S. (the globe’s largest producers). Ethanol, which is Rogers’s third book, offers “the first full picture of the long history of this renewable fuel that from the beginning offered an imperfect alternative to oil.”

The Emory News Center recently published a conversation with Rogers about Ethanol, titled “Emory historian Tom Rogers talks biofuel beyond borders.” Read the abstract of the book below and the full Q&A here.

Though ethanol, a liquid fuel made from agricultural byproducts, has generated controversy in recent years—good or bad for the environment? a big-ag boon or boondoggle?—its use goes back more than a century. Tracing the little-known history of this promising and contentious fuel, Ethanol: A Hemispheric History for the Future of Biofuels reveals the transnational nature of ethanol’s development by its two biggest producers, the U.S. and Brazil. By drawing the connections between the shifting fortunes of ethanol in these two countries, the book presents the first full picture of the long history of this renewable fuel that from the beginning offered an imperfect alternative to oil.

Though generally presented as parallel stories, the histories of ethanol in the U.S. and Brazil are inextricably linked. Authors Jeffrey T. Manuel and Thomas D. Rogers show how policies in one country shaped those in the other. Brazil patterned its mid-century development on the U.S. model, adopting an automobile- and highway-focused transportation system and a fossil fuel-intensive agricultural sector. U.S. policymakers in turn took note when Brazil responded to the 1970s oil shocks by distributing ethanol nationwide, replacing half of its gasoline consumption. In the 2000s, the nations’ leaders worked together to dramatically expand ethanol production. Today, as a new generation of biofuels meant to power aviation and fight climate change again connects Brazilian and U.S. ethanol, Manuel and Rogers explain how the fuel’s future, like its history, is complicated by technical, scientific, economic, and social questions—about how to calculate carbon emissions, agricultural land use, national security and sovereignty, and the balance between government regulation and market forces. Understanding the future of biofuels demands a reckoning with this extensive, shared history—a reckoning that Manuel and Rogers’s far-reaching, deeply researched book brings into view.