Month / October 2024

by emoryhistorydept

Crespino Helps to Reevaluate Legacy of Carter Presidency

Dr. Joseph Crespino was recently quoted in the Voice of America article, “At 100, former President Jimmy Carter’s legacy reevaluated,” which reappraises Carter’s presidency following his 100th birthday in early October 2024. An expert in the political and cultural history of the twentieth-century United States, Crespino is among multiple historians who contest conventional narratives of Carter’s presidential administration – as opposed to his much-celebrated post-presidency – as an unequivocal failure. Crespino developed this analysis, in part, through conversations with the former president, who would regularly visit campus to engage with students in Crepino’s courses in Bowden Hall.

Crespino is Senior Associate Dean of Faculty and Divisional Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences and the inaugural Jimmy Carter Professor of History. Read an excerpt of the VOA piece below along with the full article.

“Putting human rights front and center in American foreign policy — no president had done that in the way that Jimmy Carter had,” Crespino told VOA during a recent interview at his office on campus at Emory University. “It was important in shifting the balance of power in the Cold War, but it was also an important moment in the aftermath of the Vietnam War to reassert once again America’s moral responsibilities in the world.”

by emoryhistorydept

Becca de Los Santos Wins AHA Prize for Undergraduate Research

First-year graduate student Becca De Los Santos has been awarded the American Historical Association’s Raymond J. Cunningham Prize, given annually for the best article published in a journal and written by an undergraduate student. She published the prize-winning article, “Inversion of the Top-Down Operation: Enslaved Voices and French Abolitionism in 1840s Senegal,” in the Spring 2024 edition of Herodotus while in her senior year at Stanford University. Her related undergraduate honors work also received accolades. Titled “‘Poor Souls’ and ‘Dangerous Vagabonds’: The Enslaved Pursuit of Liberation in Post-Abolition Senegal, 1848-1865,” her thesis received the Josephine Baker Undergraduate Honors Thesis Prize and the Robert M. Golden Medal for Excellence in the Humanities and Creative Arts at Stanford.

As a first-year doctoral student, Becca is interested in slavery, abolition, and emancipatory trajectories in the nineteenth-century French Empire. In particular, she seeks to examine how individuals negotiated their livelihoods after emancipation through laws and customs. Her geographic areas of interest include Senegal, Réunion, French Guiana, and Guadeloupe. Her faculty advisers are Mariana P. Candido, Adriana Chira, and Clifton Crais.

by emoryhistorydept

‘Since Time Immemorial’ Wins AHA’s Katz Prize


Congratulations to Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, whose most recent book, Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico (Duke University Press, 2023), has won the prestigious Friedrich Katz Prize from the American Historical Association. The Katz Prize is given annually to the best book published in English focusing on Latin America. Since Time Immemorial, Yannakakis writes, “traces the invention, translation, and deployment of the legal category of Native custom, with particular attention to how Indigenous litigants and colonial authorities refashioned social and cultural norms related to marriage, crime, religion, land, labor, and self-governance in Native communities.” The book is available open access from Duke UP. Yannakakis is Department Chair and Professor of History. Read the book abstract below and learn more about the Katz Prize.

In Since Time Immemorial Yanna Yannakakis traces the invention of Native custom, a legal category that Indigenous litigants used in disputes over marriage, self-governance, land, and labor in colonial Mexico. She outlines how, in the hands of Native litigants, the European category of custom—social practice that through time takes on the normative power of law—acquired local meaning and changed over time. Yannakakis analyzes sources ranging from missionary and Inquisition records to Native pictorial histories, royal surveys, and Spanish and Native-language court and notarial documents. By encompassing historical actors who have been traditionally marginalized from legal histories and highlighting spaces outside the courts like Native communities, parishes, and missionary schools, she shows how imperial legal orders were not just imposed from above but also built on the ground through translation and implementation of legal concepts and procedures. Yannakakis argues that, ultimately, Indigenous claims to custom, which on the surface aimed to conserve the past, provided a means to contend with historical change and produce new rights for the future.

by emoryhistorydept

Jill Rosenthal (PhD, ’14) Wins CUNY Award for Outstanding Research


Dr. Jill Rosenthal, a 2014 alumnus and now Associate Professor of African History at Hunter College, recently received the 2024 Wasser – Gross Award for Outstanding Research from the City University of New York. The award recognizes academically impressive assistant professors from all CUNY campuses. Awardees present their research as part of the Feliks Gross and Henry Wasser lecture series. Rosenthal’s research focuses on migration, identity, and international aid in the African Great Lakes region, with a focus on the legacy of colonial borders. Duke UP published her first book, From Migrants to Refugees: The Politics of Aid along the Tanzania-Rwanda Border, last year.


Rosenthal completed her graduate work under the advisement of Dr. Clifton Crais. Read more about Rosenthal’s exceptional research and teaching: “Hunter Professor Wins CUNY Award for Outstanding Research.”

by emoryhistorydept

Rodriguez Surveys Recent Research on the Latinx South


Dr. Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of History, recently published a review essay in the Emory-based journal Southern Spaces about the state of research on Latinx histories in the U.S. South. Rodriguez’s piece analyzes how two recent books – Cecilia Márquez’s Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation (2023) and Sarah McNamara‘s Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South (2023) – expand simplistic and sometimes exoticizing narratives about Latinx populations in the “Nuevo New South.”


Rodriguez is a historian of US Latinx communities with an emphasis on the US South. Her research examines Latinx experiences in relation to culture, race, ethnicity, labor, and migration. Her current book project, “Mexican Atlanta: Migrant Place-Making in the Latinx South,” traces the history of Metro Atlanta’s ethnic Mexican community formation and broader Latinx connections beginning in the mid-twentieth century.

Read an excerpt from Rodriguez’s Southern Spaces essay below along with the full article here: “Race & Gender in the Latinx South: A Review of Cecilia Márquez’s Making the Latino South & Sarah McNamara’s Ybor City.”

“Márquez and McNamara held a roundtable discussion at the 2023 Southern Historical Association meeting in Charlotte about the shifting terrain of Latinx history. Márquez made a key aspect of Latinx history clear: “when and where you are Latino matters.” Later in the same session McNamara added that, along with generational cohorts, “migration patterns matter.” With the various Latinx migrations to/through southern spaces since the late nineteenth at top of mind, the discussion highlighted the nuances of writing Latinx history from a southern vantage point. The conversation illuminated Chicana historian Vicki Ruiz’s argument that “region is intricately tied to Latina identity.” With attention to geographic and temporal specificities, Márquez’s Making the Latino South and McNamara’s Ybor City each demonstrate how Latina/o/x individuals, families, and communities navigated, understood, and claimed southern spaces over time. With their critical attention to the importance of regional racial formations, histories of racial capitalism, and the varied dimensions (racialized, gendered, generational) of Latinx identities and community formations, Márquez and McNamara have each made contributions that enrich more than two decades of scholarship.”

by emoryhistorydept

Marissa L. Nichols (PhD, ’23) and Arturo Luna Loranca (PhD, ’24) Receive Dissertation Awards


Two of the Emory History Department’s recent doctoral graduates, both from the department’s top-tier Latin American History program, have been awarded prizes for their dissertations. Dr. Marissa L. Nichols, whose dissertation is titled “Nurses, Indigenous Authorities, and Rural Health in Oaxaca, Mexico, 1934-1970,” received two prizes: the Teresa E. Christy Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing (AAHN) as well as honorable mention for the Richmond Brown Dissertation Prize from the Latin American & Caribbean Section (LACS) of the Southern Historical Association (SHA). Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, History Department Chair and Professor, advised Nichols’s dissertation. The award committee offered the following assessment of Nichols’s dissertation:

The study by Marissa Nichols is a layered and fascinating account of public health efforts in rural Mexico.  This dissertation is very readable and well documented and makes a serious contribution to the literature on development initiatives, especially in healthcare and education in indigenous communities in Mexico. It is original in that it asks new questions of the source data and centers nursing history in contexts other than the usual Eurocentric framework and many of the concepts can be applied globally.

Using the close reading of primary sources and ethnohistory along with a native linguist, Dr. Nichols develops a strong argument for new, rigorous review of how translation of documents impacts the conclusions drawn by researchers of cross-cultural concepts and constructs. The use of a wide variety of methods and approaches to uncover lesser-known aspects of the work of rural nurses, Dr. Nichols provides a scholarly ethnohistory that is a true pleasure to read.

Dr. Arturo Luna Loranca also received honorable mention for the Richmond Brown Dissertation Prize for his doctoral thesis, titled “The Dog Remains: Mexico City’s Canine Massacres During the Enlightenment, 1770-1821.” Associate Professor Dr. Javier Villa-Flores advised his dissertation.

Congratulations to you both!