Month / March 2022

by abritt

Strocchia and Kelly Publish Co-Authored Article in ‘Renaissance Studies’

Dr. Sharon T. Strocchia, Professor of History and Department Chair and her former honors student Ryan Kelly published a co-authored article titled “Picturing the Pox in Italian Popular Prints, 1550-1650” in the flagship British journal Renaissance Studies in March. The article drew on material from Kelly’s honors thesis, which received highest honors in May 2021. Read the article abstract below along with the full piece here.

“The disease commonly known as the ‘pox’ or the ‘French Disease’ ravaged the European continent following its initial appearance circa 1495. Its devastating physical effects and sensory assaults, ranging from stinking sores to baldness and collapsed noses, invited both a social and medical evaluation of what was quickly recognized to be a sexually transmitted disease. Despite the prevalence and visibility of the pox in sixteenth-century Europe, its visual language has not been studied in much depth. This essay examines how cheap narrative prints issued between 1550 and 1650 helped construct the iconography of pox and disseminate medical information about it in late Renaissance Italy. Focusing on a group of best-selling Venetian and Roman prints, the essay argues that multimedial picture stories combining text and image provided one of the many sources of vernacular information by which Italians learned to read the body. In recounting stories of diseased prostitutes and their clients in vivid detail, these prints expanded vernacular health literacy and provided a ready-made language of disease. The prints analysed here enjoyed enormous social reach as components of a new health-promoting, communicative object – the hand-held paper fan – whose popularity cemented visual and epistemic connections between pox and prostitution.“

by abritt

Tom Chaffin (PhD, ’95) Publishes ‘Odyssey: Young Charles Darwin, The Beagle, and The Voyage that Changed the World’

Tom Chaffin, a 1995 graduate of the doctoral program, has just published Odyssey: Young Charles Darwin, The Beagle, and The Voyage that Changed the World. Chaffin’s eighth book, Odyssey offers a glimpse into the often overlooked aspects of Charles Darwin’s five-year travels aboard the HMS Beagle and on land from the Americas to South Africa and Australia. An excerpt of the book was recently printed in Lapham’s Quarterly under the title, “A Disgrace to His Family: Meet Charles Darwin, somewhat aimless student and excellent beetle hunter.” Read a description of the book below and find out more information here.

Charles Darwin—alongside Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein—ranks among the world’s most famous scientists. In popular imagination, he peers at us from behind a bushy white Old Testament beard. This image of Darwin the Sage, however, crowds out the vital younger man whose curiosities, risk-taking, and travels aboard HMS Beagle would shape his later theories and served as the foundation of his scientific breakthroughs.

Though storied, the Beagle‘s voyage is frequently misunderstood, its mission and geographical breadth unacknowledged. The voyage’s activities associated with South America—particularly its stop in the Galapagos archipelago, off Ecuador’s coast—eclipse the fact that the Beagle, sailing in Atlantic, Pacific and Indian ocean waters, also circumnavigated the globe.

Mere happenstance placed Darwin aboard the Beagle—an invitation to sail as a conversation companion on natural-history topics for the ship’s depression-prone captain. Darwin was only twenty-two years old, an unproven, unknown, aspiring geologist when the ship embarked on what stretched into its five-year voyage. Moreover, conducting marine surveys of distance ports and coasts, the Beagle‘s purposes were only inadvertently scientific. And with no formal shipboard duties or rank, Darwin, after arranging to meet the Beagle at another port, often left the ship to conduct overland excursions.

Those outings, lasting weeks, even months, took him across mountains, pampas, rainforests, and deserts. An expert horseman and marksman, he won the admiration of gauchos he encountered along the way. Yet another rarely acknowledged aspect of Darwin’s Beagle travels, he also visited, often lingered in, cities—including Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Valparaiso, Santiago, Lima, Sydney, and Cape Town; and left colorful, often sharply opinionated, descriptions of them and his interactions with their residents. In the end, Darwin spent three-fifths of his five-year “voyage” on land—three years and three months on terra firma versus a total 533 days on water.

Acclaimed historian Tom Chaffin reveals young Darwin in all his complexities—the brashness that came from his privileged background, the Faustian bargain he made with Argentina’s notorious caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas, his abhorrence of slavery, and his ambition to carve himself a place amongst his era’s celebrated travelers and intellectual giants. Drawing on a rich array of sources— in a telling of an epic story that surpasses in breadth and intimacy the naturalist’s own Voyage of the Beagle—Chaffin brings Darwin’s odyssey to vivid life.

by abritt

History Department Statement on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

The faculty of the Department of History at Emory University are horrified and deeply saddened by events unfolding in Ukraine on account of the unprovoked and massive invasion by Russian forces. Putin’s government is directly responsible for this war of aggression. As historians, we understand the long struggles of Ukrainians for democracy and peaceful relations with all their neighbors – often against heavy odds. We affirm our solidarity with the Ukrainian people, and we join people of conscience throughout the world calling for crippling sanctions against the Russian regime and for urgent efforts to force an immediate withdrawal of Russian forces, address the humanitarian crisis, and restore democracy in Ukraine.