In the spring 2026 semester, Dr. Carl Suddler, Associate Professor of History, and Emory sociologist Dr. Karida Brown have offered an interdisciplinary course called “Sports, Power, and Society.” Building on the “Last Lectures” series, a curriculum developed by Civil Rights icon and sociologist Dr. Harry Edwards, the course analyzes how sport intersects with an array of topics, from race, politics, and fashion to urban planning, inequality, and global power.
Students in the spring course have benefitted from the proximity of the upcoming FIFA World Cup, which will bring the high-stakes global soccer to Atlanta and 15 other host cities in North America this summer. Atlanta and Los Angeles are the only two cities in the U.S. to host both a summer Olympic games and the World Cup. This fact, Suddler and Brown argue, have made Emory the ideal place to study the power of sport in shaping culture, cities, economies, and everyday life.
Emory History graduate students Andrew Aldridge (U.S. History, 5th year) and Tymesha-Elizabeth Kindell (U.S. History, 2nd year) serve as teaching assistants for the course.
Fox 5 Atlanta recently interviewed Suddler about the offering, the World Cup’s impact on Atlanta, and parallels between the 2026 mega event and the 1996 Olympics. Find the conversation here: “Emory offers class on impact of FIFA World Cup.”
L-R: Herman Lindsey, Cortney Lawler, Corinna Barret Lain, Katherine Raeymaekers (Consul General of Belgium), Daniel LaChance
Dr. Daniel LaChance, Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow in Law and Associate Professor of History, recently spoke at a public event about the death penalty hosted by the School of Law at Georgia State University. Organized by the consulates of Belgium, France, Ireland, Germany, and the United Kingdom, the event was titled “Justice or Injustice? Moral and Legal Questions Around Capital Punishment.” Find the full program here.
Dr. Sean T. Byrnes, a 2014 graduate of the doctoral program in U.S. history, recently published his second book, The United States and the Ends of Empire: Decolonization, Hierarchy, and World Order since 1776, with Bloomsbury Press. The four-century history examines the relationship between the United States, empire, and decolonization from the revolutionary war through the present.
Byrnes’s research centers on U.S. politics, international relations, and global economic inequality. His first book, Disunited Nations: U.S. Foreign Policy, Anti-Americanism, and the Rise of the New Right, was published by LSU Press in 2021. His writings have also appeared in Time, The New Republic, Dissent, Jacobin, Diplomatic History, Diplomatica, International Journal, and for the History News Network. He hosts conversations with authors on the New Books Network, serves on the Board of Editors for Federal History, and is a Section Editor for the newly released Routledge Online Encyclopedia of the Cold War.
Byrnes completed his doctoral training under the advisement of Dr. Fraser Harbutt.
Read an abstract of the Byrnes’s new book below and learn more via Bloomsbury Press.
Few topics are more important to understanding the origins of the modern world than decolonization, and few countries have played a more important role in that history than the United States.In this book, Sean T. Byrnes provides a definitive, single-volume account of the relationship between the United States, decolonization, and world order.
Through a lively narrative history that ranges across four centuries, Byrnes reveals how the process of ending and replacing empires defined the American relationship to the world from the colonial era to the present. Despite the egalitarian rhetoric of the American Revolution, hierarchies born of the imperial age—and defined by ideas about race, capitalism, and civilization—fundamentally shaped American views of who was entitled to sovereignty and when. Therefore, far from building a world of “Westphalian” sovereign equality, the United States instead manipulated, expanded, and then attempted to dominate globe spanning structures of wealth and power that served the few at the expense of the many.
From early interactions with Native Americans and a decolonizing Latin America, to efforts to bolster global hierarchies after the World Wars and influence the postcolonial “Third World”, The United States and the Ends of Empire, tells the story of a US that may not always have embraced formal empire but nevertheless still sought to organize the world in imperial ways. In the process, it reveals how Americans helped build today’s modern, globalized world—and the unequal hierarchies of wealth and power that define it.
She has served as Chair of Liberal Arts at PNCA since 2020, and her scholarly interests have expanded to include pedagogy, writing, and research in the humanities with a focus on artists and designers.
Her recently published works include a chapter on pedagogical strategies for teaching Immigration to Latin America and the Handbook of Latin American Studies, published by the Library of Congress, for which she is the Modern Argentina editor. Nouwen completed her dissertation under the advisement of Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History.
