Month / October 2026

by emoryhistorydept

Lesser’s ‘Living and Dying in São Paulo’ Awarded Honorable Mention from LASA


Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, was awarded honorable mention from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Brazil Section for his latest book, Living and Dying in São Paulo: Immigrants, Health, and the Built Environment in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2025). The award category is Best Book in the Humanities, or the Antonio Candido Prize.

In his review of Lesser’s work in the Hispanic American Historical Review, Gilberto Hochman (Oswaldo Cruz Foundation) writes: “Through meticulous and multidisciplinary research, Lesser establishes a dialogue with the growing Brazilian historiography on the city, health, and epidemics, adding new questions and answers from the countless layers that are established over time in an urban space.”

Lesser is also the author of A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy, 1960–1980 (Duke UP, 2007) and Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Duke UP, 1999).

by emoryhistorydept

Doctoral Student Becca Aponte Publishes Two-Part Series in AHA’s ‘Perspectives’


Third-year doctoral student Becca Aponte (African history) has published a pair of articles in the American Historical Association’s newsmagazine Perspectives on History. Aponte’s columns examine the theme “Africa, Women, and the Global History of Capitalism” through contemporary and historical commerce and culture in Dakar, Senegal.

The columns intersect with Aponte’s research in French West Africa, which (as she describes) examines “how women constructed alternative regimes of property, credit, and commerce across a century of imperial expansion in rural Senegal – from the abolition of slavery to the dismantling of colonial subjecthood.” Aponte’s graduate work is advised by Professors Mariana P. Candido, Adriana Chira, and Clifton Crais.

Read about Aponte and the other summer 2026 Perspectives columnists here, and find links to her two columns:

“Capitalism at Ground Level”

By Becca Aponte
Published July 30, 2026

“Small Property, Big Meanings”

By Becca Aponte
Published September 15, 2026

by emoryhistorydept

Four History Majors among Fox Center’s Undergraduate Honors Fellows Cohort


Four History majors students are among the 2026-27 cohort of Undergraduate Humanities Honors Fellows at Emory’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (FCHI). The fellows program supports undergraduates as they complete their honors theses, introduces them to the life of the humanities, and provides a venue for interdisciplinary interchange, mentorship, and conference-style presentation. Fellows will conduct research intersecting with the FCHI’s theme for this year, Habitat, which researchers will engage as “both a physical place for living and the necessary conditions for thriving.”


View short profiles of 2026-27 fellows from the History Department below and follow the links to more extended biographies.

Emma Faz is double-majoring in Classics and History. Her thesis, “Exploring Potential Uses of Room X in the House of the Vettii,” examines erotic wall paintings in Pompeii’s House of the Vettii as a lens to understand how concepts of sexuality, status, and power coexisted in a Roman home

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Cabot Postol studies History and African Studies. His thesis project, titled “Iron & the Bomi Hills: Liberia, the United States, and Cold War Resource Sovereignty, 1945-1977,” is a microhistory that analyzes questions of sovereignty, the environment, labor, and the postwar economic order.

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William Shan is a History major who studies how Irishmen lived, moved, and conceived of themselves in early-nineteenth century Sierra Leone as governors, justices, commissioners, bureaucrats, soldiers, settlers, and merchants. His thesis is titled “The Empire’s Laboratories: Ireland, Sierra Leone, and the Movement of Policy and Personnel, 1808-1841.”

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Eloise So is a History and English double major. Her project, “The Suburban Dream in Chinatown: Culture, Place, and Family in San Francisco, 1945–1965,” examines how postwar life shaped Chinese American migration from San Francisco’s Chinatown to the city’s western neighborhoods.

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