Assistant Professor of History Carl Suddler participated in a faculty panel as a part of new student orientation in mid August. Suddler was joined by three other Emory faculty panelists, Pearl Dowe, Gregory Ellison, and Tayari Jones, as well as moderator Andra Gillespie. The conversation centered on our current historic moment, the convergence of social and health inequities and the need for advocacy, the importance of Atlanta, and the ways students can productively process and engage with these issues. Read more about the event here.
Month / August 2020
Sean Wempe (PhD, 2015) Publishes ‘Chronic Disparities: Public Health in Historical Perspective’ with Oxford UP
Dr. Sean Wempe, a 2015 alumnus of the History PhD program, has published his second book with Oxford University Press. The timely book – Chronic Disparities: Public Health in Historical Perspective – follows Wempe’s 2019 Revenants of the German Empire:
Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations. Wempe is Assistant Professor at California State University Bakersfield. Read more about Chronic Disparities below.
Chronic Disparities: Public Health in Historical Perspective begins with a controversial and pressing issue facing students today: how have public health initiatives challenged and/or reinforced societal inequalities of race, class, and gender? It explores the cultural, political, religious, demographic, and economic effects both government and private public-health practices have had on inequalities of race, class, and gender in an increasingly globalizing society, from the pre-Modern era to the present.
Chronic Disparities examines events and processes including the emergence of public health and sanitation in Europe; the coercive globalization of systems of health; colonial medicine and the selective application of “Western” medical policy; eugenics; responses to substance abuse; the AIDS/HIV pandemic; and many more. It includes a series introduction that explains this innovative approach to learning history and a conclusion that offers a model for applying the approach in seeking to understand other public health policies, events, and crises.
Anderson Quoted in ‘The 19th’ Article on Race and Suffrage
Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently quoted in an article published on The 19th, a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom reporting at the intersection of gender, politics and policy. Titled “‘We’ versus ‘Me’: Suffrage centennial exposes vote gap in Black and White women,” the piece charts the divergent histories of voting rights activism, organizing, and victories for Black and White women from the movement to pass the 19th amendment through the present. Read an excerpt quoting Anderson below along with the full piece.
In the century since White women won access to the ballot, they have often sided with White men, choosing their race over their gender to maintain an unequal America, says Carol Anderson, Emory University professor and author of “One Person, No Vote.”
“Black women’s political power has been about strengthening the United States,” Anderson said. “For White women, it has been about entrenching White supremacy. It is about the ‘we’ versus the ‘me.’ And it’s that difference in framing that is fundamental.”
Klibanoff Awarded New Arts and Social Justice Fellowship
In the fall 2020 semester Emory inaugurated the Arts and Social Justice (ASJ) Fellowship program, which pairs Emory faculty and students with Atlanta artists to examine how creative thinking and artistic expression can inspire positive social change. One of the recipients of the inaugural fellowship is Hank Klibanoff, the director and co-teacher of the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project and the James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism. Klibanoff is paired with actor Garrett Turner, an Emory alumnus as well as former Woodruff and Bobby Jones Scholar. Their work will center on the lives and times of known victims of the 1906 Atlanta race massacre. Read more about the collaboration and the other members of the inaugural ASJ cohort here: “Emory faculty, students join forces with Atlanta artists to explore social justice.”
Price to Serve on Public Health Emergency Committee
Dr. Polly J. Price, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Professor of Global Health, and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently chosen to serve on the Study Committee on Public Health Emergency Authorities of the Uniform Law Commission. The Uniform Law Commission describes the scope of the committee’s work as studying “the need for and feasibility of one or more uniform state laws addressing the authority of state governments to respond to epidemics, pandemics, and other public health emergencies.” Price’s areas of expertise include immigration and citizenship, U.S. legal history, legislation and regulation, public health law. She is currently authoring Plagues in the Nation (forthcoming from Beacon Press), a book about how epidemics have shaped U.S. law and continue to pose challenges for disease control in democratic societies.
Dinner Awarded Fellowships from ACLS and Princeton
Dr. Deborah Dinner, Associate Professor of Law and associated faculty in the History Department, has received two fellowships this year. The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) awarded Dinner the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars, which she will use at the Kluge Center, Library of Congress, in 2022-2023. In addition, Dinner received the the Law and Public Affairs Fellowship from Princeton University, where she will hold a visiting, residential appointment for the academic year 2020-21. Read more about these awards and Dinner’s work here.
Rogers Co-Authors Editorial in ‘Brasil Wire’: “Ethanol: Fuel for Corruption”
Dr. Thomas D. Rogers, Arthur Blank/NEH Chair in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences (2018-2021) and Associate Professor of Modern Latin American History, recently published an opinion piece in Brasil Wire. Titled “Ethanol: Fuel for Corruption,” the article was co-written with Rogers’s collaborator Jeff Manuel (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville). Rogers and Manuel are writing a transnational history of biofuels in Brazil and the United States. The Brasil Wire article situates recent ethanol-fueled corruption in a longer historical arc of biofuel business, policy, and politics within and between the two countries. Read a description of the article below, along with the full piece.
“Ethanol burst into the news cycle again last week with reports that the US ambassador to Brazil had lobbied for the cancellation of an ethanol tariff, arguing that the move would help Trump’s reelection. As historians writing a transnational history of ethanol in Brazil and the United States, we recognize the episode as part of a familiar pattern. Within and between the two countries, corruption has followed the politically-charged fuel and so have battles over its market. This history reveals the irony of the recent attacks on Brazil’s tariff.”
Anderson Discusses Significance of Harris’s VP Nomination for ‘The Current’
Matt Galloway, host of the Canada Broadcasting Corporation program The Current, recently interviewed Dr. Carol Anderson about the significance of the nomination of Kamala Harris for vice president on the Democratic ticket. Harris, who accepted the formal nomination this week, would be the first Black woman and person of Indian descent to serve as vice president in the United States. Anderson discusses how voters may respond to Harris’s record in the general election, as well as how her nomination might serve to galvanize voters in the face of suppression tactics. Anderson, who most recently authored One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2018), is Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department.
Klibanoff’s ‘Buried Truths’ Podcasts Remembers Civil Rights ‘Cold Case’ Widow
A special episode of the podcast hosted by Dr. Hank Klibanoff, a veteran journalist and historian in Emory’s Creative Writing Program, was recently featured by the Emory News Center. Titled Buried Truths, Klibanoff’s award-winning podcast mirrors his undergraduate initiative, the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project, in seeking to explain how racially-motivated killings went unpunished in the Civil Rights era. In the special episode, “Sallie Mama 1923-2020,” Klibanoff remembers Sallie Nixon, whose husband Isaiah was murdered in rural Georgia in 1948 for voting. Sallie Nixon died of COVID-19 in July 2020. The Nixon family was the focus of season one of “Buried Truths,” which won a Robert F. Kennedy Award in 2019 and the prestigious Peabody Award in 2018. Listen to the episode, which is produced by the Atlanta NPR affiliate WABE: “Sallie Mama 1923-2020.”
Anderson Charts the Evolution of Voter Suppression for ‘The Washington Post’
Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, charts the evolution of voter suppression tactics in a recent interview and video essay in The Washington Post. Anderson discusses how those tactics have morphed from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries through the present. She is the author of One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2018) and White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury, 2016). View the full Washington Post piece here: “Opinion | Voter suppression never went away. It evolved.”