Month / May 2021

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Alumni Update: Dr. Claudia Kreklau (PhD, ’18)

Dr. Claudia Kreklau is a 2018 graduate of the doctoral program and associate lecturer at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Kreklau offers an update of recent publications, presentations, and podcast contributions in the list below. Kreklau completed her dissertation, titled “‘Eat as the King Eats’: Making the Middle Class through Food, Foodways, and Food Discourses in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” under the advisement of Dr. Brian Vick.

Journal article:

“Neither Gendered nor a Room: The Kitchen in Central Europe and the Masculinization of Modernity, 1800-1900,” in Special Section: The Kitchen in History, Global Food History, T&F, 7:1, (January 2021 e-version, March Issue 2021 paper), 5-35. DOI: 10.1080/20549547.2020.1863744.

Keynote Papers and Plenary Contributions:

“Otto von Bismarck’s Devouring Masculinity: Identity Shortcomings and Culinary Compensation of a Political Titan, 1815-1898,” Keynote, Devouring Men: Food, Masculinity and Power, University of St Andrews, (4th September 2020). 

“Making Modern Eating. How the German Middling Shaped our Culinary Practices, 1780-1914,” Plenary Lunch Lightning Round Presentation “Food for Thought,” German Studies Association (GSA) 43rd Annual Conference, Portland, USA (3-6th Oct. 2019).

Podcasts

“‎Episode1: Making Cows Brains your Oyster.” Season 1. Looking the Part. 90 Second Narratives on Apple Podcasts. Accessed March 31, 2020. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/making-cow-brains-your-oyster/id1503904443?i=1000470033190

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History Dept. Students and Faculty Receive Grants from Halle Institute

Emory’s Halle Institute for Global Research has awarded multiple undergraduate and graduate students and faculty members from the History Department with research funding throughout the 2020-’21 academic year. Directed by Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, the Halle Institute supports and promotes global research opportunities for faculty, students, and visiting scholars throughout all of Emory’s schools. See the History Department’s recipients and their funded projects below.

Rethinking Global Inequalities (with Goizueta Business and Society Institute)

Michelle Armstrong-Partida – “Singlewomen: Enslaved and Free in the Late Medieval Mediterranean”

Halle-CFDE Global Atlanta Innovative Teaching (GAIT) Grants

Adriana Chira – “Human Trafficking in World History”

URC-Halle International Research Awards in partnership with the University Research Council (URC)

Astrid M. Eckert – “Germany and the Global Commons: Environment, Diplomacy, and the Market”

Graduate Global Research Fellows

Georgia Brunner – Rwanda/Italy/Belgium      

Undergraduate Global Research Fellows

Bronwen Boyd – “The Signares of Senegambia: Slavery, “Progress,” and the French Colonial Project in the Nineteenth Century,” Emory College of Arts and Sciences: History, French Studies

Ellie Coe – “Unlikely Friendships: The Little-Known Meetings of Cosmonauts and Astronauts in the Early Space Age,” Emory College of Arts and Sciences: History, Russian and East European Studies

Alex Levine – “Dueling Dragons: Examining Welsh National Identity Through Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century British Imperial Involvement in China,” Emory College of Arts and Sciences: History

Annie Li – “A Comparative History of the Activism of Chinese American Churches and Taiwanese Churches,” Emory College of Arts and Sciences: History, Sociology

Willie Lieberman – “English Femininity in Purcell’s Operas,” Emory College of Arts and Sciences: History

Julien Nathan – “Who is the Nation: Analyzing the Relationship Between Gastarbeiter and the New Left Student Movement, 1960-1973,” Emory College of Arts and Sciences: History

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Brunner Wins Fulbright for Research in Rwanda

Congratulations to doctoral candidate Georgia Brunner on being awarded a Fulbright to support her dissertation fieldwork in Rwanda. Brunner’s project is titled “Building a Nation: Gender, Colonialism, and the Struggle for a National Identity.” Her adviser is Dr. Clifton Crais, Professor of History. Read an abstract of Brunner’s project, as well as her plan of research and service activities for the year ahead, below.

At the intersection of gender studies, the history of empire, and the history of labor, this project elucidates the ways in which gender informed divergent nationalisms in late colonial and early postcolonial Rwanda. As migratory Rwandan men looked on from neighboring Uganda and Tanzania, women still in Rwanda were left with colonial forced labor obligations, building infrastructure and commercial coffee farms. Both conservative men abroad and liberal women at home thought of forced labor as an oppressive colonial regime but they had different visions for Rwanda’s future. While liberals, and liberal women in particular, hoped for reforms in education and voting rights, conservative men hoped to reinstate what they viewed as traditional norms — patriarchal nuclear families with women confined to the domestic sphere. These new nationalisms reveal the possibilities of late colonialism and the constraints of newly independent states. By investigating the gendered dynamics of labor and nationalism in late colonial Rwanda, this project adds crucial knowledge to the history of women in the formal economy, the creation of multiple nationalisms during decolonization processes, and the gendered politics of empires and postcolonial states.

Because of a close relationship with my host university, I have been planning a number of ways to engage with undergraduate and masters students. In talking with Father Balthazar Ntivuguruswa, the Vice Chancellor of my host institution The Catholic Institute of Kabayi, I have plans to work with social science masters students to create an oral history project and bank housed at the university based both on my own research and the interests of the students. Similarly, I have plans to work with undergraduate students at the university on English writing skills that will help them in finding internationally oriented jobs after graduating.

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Rall Wins Scobie Award from Conference on Latin American History

Congratulations to graduate student Ursula Rall on receiving the James R. Scobie award from the Conference on Latin American History. The Scobie provides up to $1,500 for an exploratory research trip abroad to determine the feasibility of a Ph.D. dissertation topic dealing with some facet of Latin American history. Rall’s project is entitled, “The Spatial Mobility of African and Afro-Descended Women in the Colonial Spanish Americas.” Rall is advised by Drs. Yanna Yannakakis and Javier Villa-Flores. Read more about the project and Rall’s field research plans below.

The pre-dissertation research I plan to do this summer will explore the migration patterns of free and enslaved women of African descent in the seventeenth century centered on urban New Spain. Depending on travel restrictions and archive access, this research will either happen in Mexico City or within the United States at the Gilcrease Museum and Tulane University Library. This archival work will help determine the feasibility of my dissertation work, in which I plan to the trace patterns of spatial mobility of free and enslaved women of African descent and the social connections they made and maintained.

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Cors and Goldmon Named Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellows

Congratulations to doctoral candidates Alexander Cors and Camille J. Goldmon on being named 2021 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellows. Cors and Goldmon are among 72 graduate students nationwide to receive the fellowship, which supports the next generation of humanistic scholars in their final year of dissertation research and writing. Cors’s project, titled “Newcomers and New Borders: Migration, Property Formation, and Conflict over Land along the Mississippi River, 1750-1820,” offers a new perspective on the “periodization and geographies of North American history by viewing colonial expansion, Indigenous dispossession, and the rise of the slave-plantation economy as interconnected processes that spanned across national and imperial boundaries.” Goldmon’s project, “On the Right Side of Radicalism: African American Farmers, Tuskegee Institute, and Agrarian Radicalism in the Alabama Black Belt, 1881–1940,” reexamines “historical figures typically dismissed as conservative, unprogressive, or even apathetic and positions them instead as harbingers of change responsive to the needs of local Black farmers.” Read more about their exciting work in the links above and browse the projects of the other fellows in the 2021 ACLS cohort.

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Anderson Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies, Department Chair, and Associated Faculty in the History Department, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Anderson was one of five Emory faculty elected to the American Academy this year, the highest number for a single year in the university’s history. Read the Emory News Center’s summary of Anderson’s work below, along with their article about all five newly-elected Emory faculty. Also see the American Academy’s press release to read about the entire cohort of 252 faculty members elected this year.

Anderson is a nationally recognized historian, educator and author whose research and teaching focus on the ways that policy is made and unmade, how racial inequality and racism affect that process and outcome, and how those who have taken the brunt of those laws, executive orders and directives have worked to shape, counter, undermine, reframe, and, when necessary, dismantle the legal and political edifice used to limit their rights and humanity.

Anderson is the author of “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy,” which was long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Award in nonfiction. Her other books include “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation’s Divide,” a New York Times bestseller, Washington Post Notable Book of 2016 and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner; “Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955,” and “Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960.”

Anderson is the recipient of grants and fellowships sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, the National Humanities Center, Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. She was awarded a 2018 fellowship in Constitutional Studies by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Her work as a public scholar includes serving on working groups dealing with race, minority rights and criminal justice at Stanford’s Center for Applied Science and Behavioral Studies, the Aspen Institute, the United Nations, and as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee. She also is on the advisory board of Partners for Dignity and Human Rights.

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Dr. Abigail Meert (PhD, ’19) Wins NEH Fellowship

Congratulations to Dr. Abigail Meert, a 2019 PhD graduate in African history, on winning a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Meert received a summer stipend for her project “Suffering, Struggle, and the Politics of Legitimacy in Uganda, 1958–1996.” She will conduct archival research in Uganda and the United Kingdom along with semi-structured follow-up interviews with previous informants. The expected outcome of the research is an academic article as part of her book project on the Ugandan Civil War from 1981–1986. Meert is Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M International University.

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Smith Publishes Review Essay in ‘Southern Spaces’

Dr. Kylie M. Smith, Associate Professor in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing and Associated Faculty in the History Department, has published a review essay in the Emory-headquartered journal Southern Spaces. The essay, “Psychiatry in the Wake: Racism and the Asylumed South,” centers on two recent publications: Mab Segrest’s Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum (The New Press, 2020) and Wendy Gonaver’s The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840–1880 (UNC Press, 2019).