The History Department was pleased to receive an update from Dr. Rachel M. Johnston-White, a 2010 graduate of Emory College. After graduating with a BA in French and High Honors in History, Johnston-White headed to Yale Graduate School. She completed her doctorate in French History in 2017. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The volume Social Justice in Twentieth-Century Europe, to which she contributed a chapter, was published with Cambridge University Press this spring. 

Johnston-White also just learned that she has won a one-year Open Competition XS grant from the NWO (Dutch Research Council) to work on a brand-new project on soldiers’ photographs of wartime atrocities, a subject that unfortunately remains all too relevant. Soldiers’ photographs not only shape public opinion, as in the current Israel/Gaza conflict and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, but also constitute an evidence base for legal action against states and individual perpetrators. Yet soldiers’ unique positionality and its impact on their photography are poorly understood, leaving scholars and the public alike blind to the subjectivity of such photographs. Her project will use an earlier conflict, the Algerian War for independence from France (1954- 1962), to contextualize and compare the photos of soldiers who were participants in or opponents of war atrocities in order to answer the question: does a soldier’s attitude towards war atrocities shape the photographic choices they make, and, if so, how?

Are you an Emory History alum? Please share updates on your life and work with us!