Incoming faculty member Dr. Tamar Menashe, a historian of late medieval and early modern Jewish and European history, was recently awarded the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize by the German Historical Institute. Menashe’s dissertation is titled “The Imperial Supreme Court and Jews in Cross-Confessional Legal Cultures in Germany, 1495-1690.” A graduate of Columbia University, Menashe will join Emory’s Department of History and the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies this fall as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. She will begin her appointment as the Jay and Leslie Cohen Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies in Fall 2023.
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Dr. Claudia Kreklau (Ph.D., ’18) Publishes Article on Bismarck and Gender in ‘German History’
Emory History alum Dr. Claudia Kreklau published an article in the April issue of the journal German History. Titled “The Gender Anxiety of Otto von Bismarck, 1866–1898,” the piece is Kreklau’s fourth published article. Kreklau completed under Ph.D. in 2018 under the advisement of Dr. Brian Vick. She is Associate Lecturer at the University of St. Andrews. Read the abstract of the article below along with the full piece here.
“Building on critical re-examinations of the ‘Bismarck myth’ and scholarship on the fin de siècle crisis of identity in Europe, this article examines key vignettes in the political career of Otto von Bismarck during Prussia’s era of expansion and consolidation, c.1866–1898, through the lens of gender. It finds the legendary ‘Iron Chancellor’ experienced extreme gender-anxiety to the point of social dysphoria until the 1870s. Assigned feminine roles and lacking political decision-making power, Bismarck resorted to tantrums, tears, threats of self-harm and suicide, suffered mental breakdowns and enacted the kinds of ‘feminine’ intrigue of which he accused Europe’s royal women throughout his life. To stabilize their own identity in the early 1870s, he and his contemporaries weaponized misogyny to deflect accusations of femininity away from themselves and onto women at court. Bismarck claimed to have led negotiations in a masculine manner in the era of Europe’s colonial cabinet diplomacy. After his death, contemporaries studied the shape and measurements of Bismarck’s head to find an explanation for his alleged genius and marketed the statesman as an example of potent masculinity. Early hagiographic instrumentalizations of Bismarck should be read as part of a wider attempt to legitimize forms of white masculine rule and justify limited political participation in this period.”
Graduate Student Olivia Cocking Wins SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship
Graduate Student Olivia Cocking recently received a doctoral fellowship from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. The generous multi-year fellowships “support high-calibre students engaged in doctoral programs in the social sciences and humanities.” Cocking’s work centers on the history of women and gender in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, particularly how gender shapes experiences of urban life. Drs. Judith A. Miller and Elizabeth Goodstein serve as Cocking’s dissertation supervisors.
Ph.D. Graduate Camille Goldmon Featured by Emory News
Dr. Camille Goldmon graduated with her Ph.D. in history in the spring of 2022. The Emory News Center celebrated Goldmon’s graduate career with a feature story titled “An unexpected knack for mentoring forges connections on campus and beyond.” The piece spans from Goldmon’s initial decision to apply to Laney Graduate School through her stellar impact at Emory and post-graduate plans: a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton, followed by a tenure-track position at the University of Oregon. Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African-American Studies, supervised Goldmon’s dissertation, “On the Right Side of Radicalism: African American Farmers, Tuskegee Institute, and Agrarian Radicalism in the Alabama Black Belt, 1881–1940.” Read the full Emory News Center piece here along with an excerpt quoting Anderson below.
“Camille Goldmon is, like a riff on the Maya Angelou poem, Phenom, Phenom, Phenomenal Scholar,” says Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and chair of African American Studies and Goldmon’s advisor. “Her research is innovative and forces us to rethink radicalism. Her teaching is engaging, powerful and transformative. Her mentoring of students in the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program is outstanding. Her work on uncovering Atlanta’s past for the Just Futures Mellon grant is mind-blowing and narrative disrupting.”
“If this sounds like a string of superlatives, it’s simply because that’s Camille,” Anderson adds. “She is superlative.”
History Honors Student Hannah Charak Wins James Z. Rabun Prize in American History
Congratulations to History Honors student Hannah Charak on winning the James Z. Rabun Prize in American history, given by the History Department each year to the graduating senior with the best record in that field. Hannah’s Senior Honors thesis, “Terror from the Top Down: Violence & Voter Suppression in the Postwar South,” was directed by Prof. Jason Ward. She was among the Spring 2022 inductees to the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
She writes that “Professor Hank Klibanoff’s class [on Civil Rights Cold Cases] was very formative for me.” She continued her work with him through research on the Ahmaud Arbery case (which became Season 3 of Buried Truths podcast). In the Fall of 2021, she was a teaching assistant for his Cold Cases class. She found the “TA role was really interesting, as it allowed me to get a glimpse of what teaching a class would be like.” She also “enjoyed Dr. Joseph Crespino’s and Dr. Maria Montalvo’s classes very much.” She did research for both of their projects at various points over the past couple of years. She praises Dr. Jason Ward, her adviser, who “has probably influenced me the most during my time at Emory. I’ve been taking his classes since freshman year, which have inspired me to consider history as a profession.”
This prize was established in 1981 on the occasion of the retirement of Professor James Z. Rabun after thirty-four years’ service in the Department of History. In awarding this prize, the department also honors Professor Rabun’s distinctive traits of courtesy, integrity, wisdom, and unselfish devotion to his students and colleagues. The Rabun Prize consists of a book in the field of American history.
The prize was awarded on April 27 at the History Department’s Senior Celebration.
Many congratulations, Hannah!
LaChance Co-Organizes Upcoming Conference ‘Unsettling Law’ at Emory School of Law
Dr. Daniel LaChance, Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor of History, has co-organized and will present at a conference on Emory’s campus this week. Titled “Unsettling Law,” the conference is the 24th annual gathering of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities (LCH). LaChance is currently treasurer of the organization. The Emory University School of Law will host the June 16-17 gathering, which will include mostly in-personal conversations with virtual attendance options available for some events.
LaChance will chair a panel titled “Rethinking Retribution” and present a paper – “Captain Vere’s Electric Chair: The Cultural Politics of State Killing in the Late 19th Century United States” – on a panel centered on “Affect, Attachment and Capital Punishment.” In addition to panels and in an effort to foster the next generation of scholars in law and the humanities, the LCH is holding an all-day workshop for 15 Ph.D. students on Wednesday, June 15, and partially subsidizing their travel and accommodations. Read the overview of the conference below and find out more information here.
Law often resides in the pull between what is settled and what is not. Precedent guides us until it does not. Law’s stability is in constant conversation with its own necessary responsiveness as well as with what troubles it from outside of legal institutions. Disobediences, whether civil or not, have the power to unsettle what is taken to be settled. And forces like climate change pose challenges to settled law by destabilizing what may make obedience and order possible at all. Law continually expands the range of persons it recognizes, for better or worse, while it claims across all changes that it serves the interests of all. Borders exclude but remain permeable, and we argue about what is owed to others regardless of their citizenship status. States claim sovereignty and face refusals from other sovereignties within their borders. Even settler colonialism is a process rather than an outcome, so what is settled and what remains open to different futures may be contested. How do and should we imagine law in these unsettled times? What creative forces might we bring to bear in these moments between past and future, whether for unsettling what ought to change or stabilizing what is endangered? How might different disciplines, methodologies, arts, literatures, and technologies represent, reinforce, or resist unsettling law? We invite proposals taking up that question from a variety of humanities-oriented perspectives.
Billups Awarded Grant for Research at the Southern Baptist History Library and Archives
Graduate student Robert Billups has received a Lynn E. May Study Grant to support research at the Southern Baptist History Library and Archives in Nashville, TN. Billups received the same grant in 2020 to support work on an article project. The upcoming research will directly inform Billups’s dissertation, “‘Reign of Terror’: Anti–Civil Rights Terrorism in the United States, 1955–1976,” which investigates violence against participants in the mid-20th-century Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. Congratulations, Robert!
History Major Edina Hartstein Wins Cuttino Scholarship for Independent Research Abroad
Congratulations to junior History Major Edina Hartstein on winning a George P. Cuttino Scholarship for Independent Research Abroad for Summer 2022 travel to London for her Honors thesis. She will also be a Halle Institute Undergraduate Global Research Fellow. Her working title is “The League of Nations’ Advisory Committee on Trafficking in Women & Children: The British Empire’s Role & Impact.”
Hartstein writes that “The first history class I took, ‘Hist 190: Fake News,’ introduced me to the History Department. Not only did I learn a lot, but I built relationships that are still important to me. I met Dr. Judith A. Miller, who later became my major advisor, and pushed me to explore different areas within the field.” Hartstein will work with her thesis advisor, Dr. Tehila Sasson, who taught her “Race and the End of Empire.” That thought provoking class caused Edina to reconsider her understandings of empire, which has been critical for the development of her thesis.
Hannah Abrahamson Hired at College of the Holy Cross
Hannah Abrahamson, a doctoral candidate graduating in the summer of 2022, has been hired as Assistant Professor of Early Modern Latin American History at the College of the Holy Cross. Abrahamson completed her dissertation, titled “Women of the Encomienda: Households and Dependents in Sixteenth-Century Yucatan, Mexico,” under the advisement of Drs. Yanna Yannakakis, Javier Villa-Flores, and Tonio Andrade. She looks forward to teaching courses on gender and sexuality and Indigenous history at the Worcester, MA, liberal arts college in the upcoming academic year.
History Department Welcomes New Faculty: Dr. Laura Nenzi and Dr. Tamar Menashe
The History Department is excited to announce two new faculty hires. Dr. Laura Nenzi, a social historian of Early Modern Japan, will be joining the Department of History as Acting Full Professor in Fall 2022. Dr. Tamar Menashe, a historian of late medieval and early modern Jewish and European history, will join the Department of History and the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in History and Jewish Studies in Fall 2022. Menashe will begin her appointment as the Jay and Leslie Cohen Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies in Fall 2023. Welcome to you both!