Month / January 2017

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Crespino on “This Complex American Moment” in ‘The New York Times’

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Photo from Emory News Center

Dr. Joseph Crespino, Jimmy Carter Professor of History, was among fourteen contributors to a January 25 article in The New York Times, “How Do You View This Complex American Moment?” Read the full article and check out a copy of Crespino’s comments below.

“I don’t think we’ve ever seen a president take office under these circumstances with this many unknowns, people on both sides with a sense that we’re in uncharted waters. We have to remember what kind of revolutionary period we’re living through. We’re really living through a digital revolution that I think has upended our economy, it’s upended our society and now we see it clearly revolutionizing our politics and creating all of these circumstances that are new to us, that as a democracy, we’re going to try to get a hold of. My inclination is that we’re in this kind of disarray — this kind of messiness is going to be the new normal — for the foreseeable future.”

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Four History Majors Named to 100 Senior Honorary from the Class of 2017

Congratulations to history majors Elana Cates, Mary Hollis McGreevy, Samantha Perlman, and Lindsay Petersohn, who were selected for induction into the 100 Senior Honorary Emory Class of 2017. This annual list comprises the most outstanding 100 seniors from Oxford College, Emory College, Goizueta Business School, and the School of Nursing. As explained by the 100 Senior Honorary website, selected students “are deeply committed to their beliefs, pursuits, or passions” and “have made outstanding contributions to Emory through academics, athletics, leadership, volunteerism, or even through personal relationships such as mentoring or helping other students.” Check out the full list of 2017 inductees here.

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History Honors Students McGlade and Perlman Receive FCHI Fellowships

Congratulations to History Honors students Hugh McGlade and Samantha Perlman, who have received Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (FCHI) Undergraduate Humanities Honors Fellowships for Spring 2017. The fellowship receives support from the Emory College of Arts and Sciences Honors Program and aids students completing honors projects for one semester. Along with office space at the FCHI and fellowship resources, recipients participate in a dynamic community of cross-generational scholars. Learn more about the FCHI fellowships and check out the brief profiles of McGlade and Perlman below.

Hugh

Hugh McGlade is majoring in History and International Studies. He focuses on Latin America, especially Brazil, and is a student of Portuguese. His thesis investigates a hunger alleviation program in Brazil during the early 1940s, exploring questions of capitalism, politics, and cultural exchange.
 
Samantha
Samantha Perlman is double majoring in History and African American Studies. Her honors thesis stems from her experience witnessing student protest movements while abroad in South Africa, as well as her interest in American educational reform. Her thesis examines the history of affirmative action at Emory College from 1969 to 1989.  By uncovering the story of affirmative action at Emory, her project provides historical context for how Emory can address systemic problems of underrepresentation and promote a more inclusive campus climate.
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Alumni Update: William S. Cossen (BA ’08)

William S. Cossen graduated from Emory University in 2008 with majors in political science and history. In December of 2016 he finished a PhD in history from Penn State University. His family, now including two children, is now back in the Atlanta area. Cossen is a faculty member of The Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology, and his spouse is a pediatric endocrinological fellow at Egleston Children’s Hospital at Emory. Gossen recently published the following article: “Catholic Gatekeepers: The Church and Immigration Reform in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” U.S. Catholic Historian 34, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 1-23. He is currently revising his first book manuscript, The Protestant Image in the Catholic Mind: Hegemony, Identity, and Catholic Nation Building in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

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Graduate Student Timothy Romans Wins Essay Prize from SECAAS

Congratulations to Emory History Department graduate student Timothy Romans, who recently won a prize for his essay “The Merchant, the Pirate, and the Telescope Maker: The Many Heroic Lives of Hamada Yahyōe.” Awarded by the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (SECAAS), the prize was announced formally at the annual SECAAS meeting in mid-January 2017 in Oxford, Mississippi.

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Dr. Mark Ravina Awarded Japan Foundation Grant for Summer 2017 Workshop

Dr. Mark Ravina, Professor of History, has been awarded a Japan Foundation Grant to host a summer 2017 (May 30 to June 2) workshop, “Japanese Language Text Mining: Digital Methods for Japanese Studies.” The workshop will bring together researchers working across the fields of computational text analysis and Japanese Studies, and will focus on the unique challenges of the digital analysis of Japanese texts. The workshop is part of a collaboration with Hoyt Long (The University of Chicago) and Molly Des Jardin (The University of Pennsylvania) on Japanese text mining. Check out the call for proposals.

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Professor Tonio Andrade’s ‘The Gunpowder Age’ Wins Distinguished Book Award

Congratulations to Dr. Tonio Andrade, whose book The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton UP, 2016) won a Distinguished Book Award from The Society for Military History. Andrade is Professor of History at Emory University. The Gunpowder Age has received broad critical acclaim, including from the Wall Street Journal, which concluded: “The Gunpowder Age is a boldly argued, prodigiously researched and gracefully written work. This book has much to offer general readers, especially those with a passion for military history, as well as specialists.” Read more about the work and its reception on Andrade’s website.

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Allen Tullos Featured in ‘New York Times’ Article on 1986 Voter Fraud Case Lost by Jeff Sessions

In a 1985 edition of Southern Changes: The Journal of the Southern Regional Council, Allen Tullos penned an article on the attempted prosecution of three civil rights activists for voter fraud in West Alabama. Tullos’s article, “Crackdown in the Black Belt,” was recently cited in a New York Times piece about the nomination of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. Sessions was the United States attorney in West Alabama who pursued and lost the case against the activists in 1986. Check out the excerpt below and read the full Times article, “The Voter Fraud Case Jeff Sessions Lost and Can’t Escape.” Dr. Tullos is Professor of History and Co-Director of the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship.

In Perry County, the polls were only open for four hours in the afternoon, even though nearly one-third of adults worked outside the county and another 15 percent were over the age of 65. White voters used absentee balloting to keep their level of participation high among local residents and also to include some who had moved away. “Letters would go out from white elected officials to a list of people they knew who owned land locally but lived elsewhere: ‘Make sure you vote absentee,’” says Allen Tullos, a historian at Emory University who has written about the Turner case. “The white power structure felt under siege, so there was a sense of ‘We’ve got to call in our friends and families to roll this back.'”

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Dr. Tehila Sasson Wins International Research Award

Congratulations to Dr. Tehila Sasson, Assistant Professor of History and a new colleague in the Emory History Department, for receiving the International Global History Research Award for 2016. Given by the The Universities of Basel, Heidelberg and Sydney, the award supports Sasson’s proposed conference, titled “Global Histories of Natural Resources.” Read more about the award, conference, and Professor Sasson’s work here.

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“Metropolis, Migration and Mosquitoes” Featured as Timely, Creative, and Cool Course

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Photo from the Bom Retiro neighborhood in São Paulo, Brazil, the test case for “Metropolis, Migration and Mosquitoes.” Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, History Department Chair and Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, will co-teach an interdisciplinary course, “Metropolis, Migration and Mosquitoes,” in the spring semester 2017. Recently featured by the Emory News Center as a timely, creative, and cool course, the class will be led by Lesser along with Uriel Kitron, Goodrich C. White Professor and Chair of Environmental Sciences, and Ana Teixeira, Director of the Portuguese Language Program and Lecturer in Portuguese, Spanish & Portuguese. Guest lecturers will include Thomas D. Rogers, Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of Modern Latin American History. Check out the course description below, and browse some of Emory’s other unique offerings this semester.

The course will analyze how “health” has been understood over time by both populations and providers using diverse methodologies, both traditional and novel. Using the Bom Retiro neighborhood of São Paulo as a test case, students will analyze disease patterns and prevention within a historical perspective. They will also analyze how questions of class, race and gender have led to historically different incidences of, and responses to, disease, understanding the relationship between cultural attitudes, exposure to diseases and access to health care.