Month / February 2026

by emoryhistorydept

Lena Oak Suk (PhD, ’14) Publishes ‘In the Darkness of the Cinema’


Doctoral program alum Dr. Lena Oak Suk (PhD, ’14) has published her first book, In the Darkness of the Cinema: Gender and Moviegoing in Early Twentieth-Century Urban Brazil, with Pittsburgh University Press. Focused on the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Suk’s work offers an innovative analysis of how movies and moviegoers reshaped gendered perceptions and gendered realities in urban Brazil at the beginning of the last century. Rielle Navitski (University of Georgia) praises In the Darkness of the Cinema as “an engaging account of how the movies transformed urban space and women’s participation in public life in Brazil.”

Suk is a research affiliate at the Institute of Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and Assistant Director of Investigator Skill-Building in the Office of the Vice President for Research, Scholarship & Creative Endeavor at UT. She completed her graduate training under the advisement of Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History.

Read the abstract of Suk’s monograph below, and find more information on Pittsburgh UP’s book page.

Gender and sexual morality, and their intersections with race and class, were central to the formation of urban Brazil in the twentieth century. In the Darkness of the Cinema takes a wide-ranging and innovative approach to gender and moviegoing culture in Brazilian society. By focusing on the flirtations and romances of the movie theater, as well as the intrigue and moral panic that they caused, Suk creates a rich portrait of spectatorship. Where women went to the movies, who they met, and what they did in the darkness were key questions that brewed among overlapping but disparate circles, from film intellectuals and filmmakers to legislators and public health officials, as well as the moviegoers themselves. Amassing sources located traditionally within film culture as well as outside of it, such as film magazines, interviews, comics, literature, and songs, Suk shows that movie theaters and moviegoers made an indelible mark on the urban landscapes of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

by emoryhistorydept

Craig Perry (PhD, ’14) Publishes ‘Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History’


Doctoral program alumnus Dr. Craig Perry has published his first monograph, Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History, with Princeton University Press. Perry’s book reconstructs the social history of slavery in Cairo at a pivotal period in the city’s history, showing how the slave trade and slavery shaped everyday life, state diplomacy, and the formation Jewish and Arab-Islamic culture.

Dr. Arnold Franklin, Associate Professor at Queens College, City University of New York, describes Perry’s book as “a major contribution to historians’ understanding of one of the most pervasive and consequential institutions in the medieval Islamic world.” David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor Emeritus at Emory, describes the work as “a brilliant reconstruction of slavery and slaveowners in the Jewish community of medieval Cairo drawing on the vast but highly fragmentary records of a synagogue.”

Perry received his doctorate in 2014. He is assistant professor in the Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies Department at Emory. Read the full abstract of Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt below and find more on the Princeton UP book page.

In this book, Craig Perry mines a remarkable cache of fragmentary documents preserved in an Egyptian synagogue to write a new history of slavery and the slave trade in the medieval Middle East. These documents—which range from the everyday correspondence of traveling merchants to legal queries sent to Jewish jurists—provide the richest surviving archive for the social history of slavery during the centuries when Cairo was an imperial and commercial capital at the intersection of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. Perry draws on this archive, known as the Cairo Geniza, to shed new light on such crucial topics as the slave trade in state diplomacy, the entanglements of gender and household slavery, and the lives of the enslaved.

Perry chronicles a protean slave trade that trafficked enslaved people from Europe, Africa, and India to the Egyptian market. His account cuts across different scales of analysis, from the macro-level of imperial rule to the micro-level of the family kitchen. Along the way, he upends the traditional story of Passover; medieval Jews, he writes, could explain slavery to their children by pointing to the enslaved people who served the holiday meal. When freed, some former slaves converted to Judaism and became the parents of Jewish children. Perry’s narrative reveals a world, long hidden from historians, in which enslaved people made their way through the alleys of Cairo, toiled in the workshops of apothecaries, and found ways to evade the surveillance of their owners. With this book, Perry writes enslaved people into the social and economic life of medieval Islamic society.

by emoryhistorydept

Camille Goldmon (PhD, ’22) Publishes ‘Black HiSTORIES’ Series on TikTok and IG


Dr. Camille Goldmon (PhD, ’22), Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, is publishing a series of stories on Instagram and TikTok for Black History Month. Titled “Black HiSTORIES,” the series broaches topics ranging from early efforts by Carter G. Woodson to celebrate Black history to the lives and work of seminal figures like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Fannie Lou Hamer.

Goldmon’s research centers on twentieth-century United States history, Southern history, and agrarianism. She completed her dissertation, “On the Right Side of Radicalism: African American Farmers, Tuskegee Institute, and Agrarian Radicalism in the Alabama Black Belt, 1881–1940,” in 2022 under the advisement of Dr. Carol Anderson.

Find the series via her handle camigoldmon on Instagram and TikTok.

by emoryhistorydept

Claudia Kreklau (PhD, ’18) Publishes ‘The Making of Modern Eating’


Dr. Claudia Kreklau, an alumnus of the Emory history doctoral program, has published The Making of Modern Eating: How the German Middle Class Forged the Way We Eat, 1780-1910 with Berghahn Books. In this, her first monograph, Kreklau traces the origins of modern foodways and culinary practices in central Europe in the nineteenth century and explores how an array of individuals expressed self-understandings through food.

Jim Brophy, Francis H. Squire Professor of History at the University of Delaware, describes The Making of Modern Eating as “a tour de force that promises to be a field-defining work.” Kreklau, he continues, is “a historian with a capacious and bold historical imagination…a rising star in our field.”

Kreklau is Honorary Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of St Andrews, and she is the three-time prize-winning author of seven academic articles. She completed her PhD in 2018 under the advisement of Dr. Brian Vick.