Experimental Interdisciplinary Faculty Fellowship Supports Innovative Research Co-Led by Jeffrey Lesser

The Emory News Center recently published a profile of a research project co-led by Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor History. Lesser and research partner Uriel Kitron, Goodrich C. White Professor and Chair of the Department of Environmental Sciences, are examining “how the dynamics of human migration, disease transmission and access to health care have impacted a vibrant immigrant neighborhood in São Paulo, Brazil — one of the world’s largest megalopolises.” Check out the full article here.

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Mark Ravina on Posing New Questions through Digital Humanities

Dr. Mark Ravina recently authored a post on Digital Humanities Now titled “Smooth and Rough on the Highways of France.” Named an “Editor’s Choice,” the post examines how quantitative methods, in this case data visualization, can assist in posing new historical questions. Below is an excerpt from the article, which can be found in full here.

One way to conceptualize this complementarity [between social science and humanistic methods] is John Tukey’s observation that “data = smooth + rough,” or, in more common parlance, quantitative analysis seeks to separate patterns and outliers. In a traditional social science perspective, the focus is on the “smooth,” or the formal model, and the corresponding ability to make broad generalizations. Historians, by contrast, often write acclaimed books and articles on the “rough,” single exceptional cases. These approaches are superficially opposite, but there is an underlying symbiosis: we need to find the pattern before we can find the outliers. 

Brett Gadsden at AJC Decatur Book Festival and in ‘The Christian Science Monitor’

Brett Gadsden, Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at Emory, recently joined best-selling novelist Greg Iles and Emory colleague Hank Klibanoff for a panel at the AJC Decatur Book Festival on cold cases from the Civil Rights era. Professor Gadsden teaches a course that involves undergraduates investigating cold cases in Georgia. The Christian Science Monitor published a feature on the panel and the work of the three panelists. The article can be found here.