Dr. Jason Morgan Ward, Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies, recently contributed to a panel on C-SPAN about new approaches to understanding the history of the South. The panel, which took place at the 2019 Southern Historical Association annual meeting, included Ward along with other authors from the upcoming edited volume Reinterpreting Southern Histories: Essays in Historiography (LSU Press, 2020). Find video of the full panel at “Reinterpreting Southern History.”
Dr. Judith A. Miller and first-year student Natalia Thomas were recently interviewed on the Georgia Public Broadcasting show On Second Thought about Miller’s first-year seminar “Fake News.” Speaking to host Virginia Prescott, Miller describes how, as a historian of 18th and 19th century France, she ended up teaching a course with a substantial focus on contemporary U.S. history. Thomas, a first-year student in the course, describes the impact “Fake News” has already had on students: “‘I used to just take what I read at face value,” she explained. “I’ve learned to be more cautious about what I’m consuming, and make sure to check multiple news sources and see what they’re saying about certain issues.”‘ Read the article summary of the conversation and listen to the full interview: “Emory University’s ‘Fake News’ Course Helps Students Tease Fact From Fiction.”
Faculty, students, and alumni from the Emory History Department were well represented at this year’s American Historical Association meeting in New York City. Scroll through the images below for a glimpse at some of the Emory historians at the AHA.
Dr. Thomas Rogers (2nd from right) opened the late-breaking session “Land Use and Climate Change—Historical Perspectives from Seven Continents”
Prof. Adriana Chira (right) was honored with the Paul Vanderwood Prize of 2019, awarded by the Conference of Latin American History for the best English-language article on Latin American history published in a journal other than the Hispanic American Historical Review and the Americas. Prof. Chira is pictured here with Prof. Yanna Yannakakis.
Prof. Carl Suddler visiting his book ‘Presumed Criminal’ at the NYU Press booth.
Dr. Joe Crespino on his way to a Saturday morning panel.
Emma C. Meyer and Rebekah Ramsay were part of the panel “Forging Citizenship after Empire: Reflections from Asia and the Middle East in the 20th Century”
Andrew G. Britt (PhD 2018, now at University of North Carolina School of the Arts) and Danielle L. Wiggins (PhD 2018, now at Caltech) presented on the panel “Planning, Difference, and Dislocation in the Black Americas: Atlanta, Port-au-Prince, and Sao Paulo”
Julia Lopez Fuentes presented her paper “Conflict and Fragmentation within the Europeanist Opposition to the Franco Regime, 1962-68” as part of the panel “Tolerating Totalitarianism: Why did the Franco Dictatorship survive?”
Associate Professor Thomas D. Rogers recently co-authored an opinion piece in The Hill with collaborator Jeffrey T. Manuel, Associate Professor of History at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. The article examines ethanol policy in the United States and Brazil, the two largest ethanol-producing countries in the world, with a focus on the powerful multiparty blocs of legislators that steer policy in both countries. Rogers and Manuel are writing a transnational history of biofuels in the United States and Brazil. Read an excerpt from the piece below along with the full article: “Who is driving our ethanol policy? And why does it matter?”
“When a government treats energy sources and fuels individually, organized groups like the rural blocs can capture policymaking. Instead, the United States and Brazil should pursue comprehensive national energy policies that prioritize decarbonization. This would diminish agribusiness’s influence over policymaking and move us toward a distributed and diverse energy system.”
Student Jeffrey Gao and associate professor of history Judith Miller. From Emory Photo/Video.
Associate Professor Judith A. Miller is teaching a first-year seminar this spring titled “Fake News.” The Emory News Center’s Maureen McGavin describes the class as investigating “examples of fake news, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, biased stories and wrongful convictions, in the U.S. and in other countries, as well as discussions of how the falsehoods took hold and were eventually debunked.” Read the Emory News Center’s profile of the course, “‘Fake News’ class helps students learn to research and identify false information,” in addition to the full course description below.
“Fake news, hoaxes, “truthiness,” lies, spin rooms, bots, leaks, deniers, and propaganda: These phenomena have shaken the world in the recent years. Fake news has become important part of our daily political culture, whether in the United States or elsewhere around the globe. Elections and public policy have been influenced by them. Our course will delve into several historical cases of hoaxes, history “deniers,” and media exploitation before turning to the recent past and even daily events in the US and elsewhere. What dynamics do those examples reveal that can illuminate the contemporary world? Then we will explore the place of social media such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as darker parts of the web, in purveying both accurate and false information. For instance, how do “fake news” authors use language, music, and images to make their ideas more persuasive? How has technology increased the power of “fake news”? Why have certain kinds of societies been more or less vulnerable to propaganda? How have courts understood the principles of “free expression,” “burden of proof,” and a “free press”? How have politicians and journalists contributed to and struggled with the recent intensifying “fake news” phenomenon? We will work closely with Woodruff librarians as we evaluate evidence: How do historians weigh claims and sources? Are there even clear red flags in our media-saturated world? How can historical examples help us sort out these questions? Each student will develop a case study of an incident–understood broadly, anything from political propaganda anywhere in the world, to allegations of wrongful conviction or sexual assault, to history deniers, as just a few examples–that takes up these issues.”
Emory University PhD alumni are well represented in the December issue of The American Historical Review (AHR). Two alumni contribute to the reflections on “One Hundred Years of Mandates.” Molly McCullers (PhD, ’13) addresses the mandate system in South Africa in her article, “Betwixt and Between Colony and Nation-State: Liminality, Decolonization, and the South West Africa Mandate.” Sean Andrew Wempe (PhD, ’15) points out in which ways the mandate system preserved empires through his article, “A League to Preserve Empires: Understanding the Mandates System and Avenues for Further Scholarly Inquiry.” In the Museum Review section, Daniel B. Domingues da Silva (PhD, ’11) authored a piece on the “Museu do Aljube Resistência e Liberdade, Lisbon, Portugal.”
Dr. Elizabeth Stice, a 2012 PhD alumna and Associate Professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University, recently authored an article in Inside Higher Ed on taking a different approach to assigned readings in her courses. In a humanities course that typically covers from 1700 through the present, Stice opted to use only one text for the entire semester: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Read about the mostly positive results of the experiment in Stice’s Inside Higher Ed article: “When Less Is More in the Classroom.” Stice completed her dissertation, “Empire Between the Lines: Constructions of Empire in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War,” under the advisement of Associate Professor of History Kathryn E. Amdur.
In December of 2019 Harvard University Press released Professor Sharon T. Strocchia‘s newest book, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy. The monograph recovers the pivotal roles that women played in providing health care in Renaissance Italy and, in doing so, uncovers their role in the transformation of early modern medicine and medical science. Sheila Barker, director at the Medici Archive Project, writes that Strocchia’s work “makes a vital contribution to the history of medicine, gender studies, and Renaissance studies.” Strocchia’s previous monographs were Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (Johns Hopkins UP, 1992) and Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (Johns Hopkins UP, 2009), which was awarded the 2010 Marraro Prize by the American Catholic Historical Association. Read more about Forgotten Healers on the site for Harvard UP.
The Emory News Center featured a profile of the Archival Lives conference from December 5-7, 2019. Co-convened by Adriana Chira (History), Clifton Crais (African Studies/History), and Walter C. Rucker (African American Studies/History), the workshop brought together an array of participants “to reckon with what it means to work with and produce archives of the African diaspora.” Read April Hunt’s feature story on the Emory News Website, “‘Archival Lives’ conference examines trans-Atlantic slave trade,” in addition to the full description of the conference at “Archival Lives.”