Senior Kendall Chan, a history and political science double major, has won a Robert T. Jones, Jr. scholarship at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The Emory Report featured Chan as an outstanding graduate from the Class of 2020. Read their feature, which includes quotations from her former teacher and department advisor Astrid M. Eckert: “Delving into questions points Emory College grad to in-depth policy work.”
History majors and minors from the Emory class of 2020 will celebrate commencement next week. As a part of our celebration of the extraordinary class of 2020, we have compiled a series of profiles of graduating students and their plans after graduation. Explore their exciting pursuits on the Emory History Facebook page.
The Emory News Center’s Leigh DeLozier recently featured Dr. Clifton Crais, graduate assistant Georgia Brunner, and several students from his “Making of Modern South Africa” class. Crais, Brunner, and the students share their perspectives on finding success in the online transition. Read an excerpt from the article below, along with the full piece: “Classes that click: The making of modern South Africa.”
What’s one lesson you’ve learned during this transition, and how will you use it later?
Crais: The importance of human contact and our common humanity, beginning with the simple act of looking into another person’s eyes. I will renew my effort to develop a unique relationship with each and every student, no matter how large the class. Paradoxically, online teaching has taught me the importance of a residential college experience. We are learning new things about the world and about each other. We are going to come out of this crisis better teachers and better students – and citizens.
Dr. Kylie Smith, a historian at the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, has published Talking Therapy: Knowledge and Power in American Psychiatric Nursing with Rutgers University Press. Five years in the making, Talking Therapy traces the rise of modern psychiatric nursing in the United States from the 1920s to the 1970s. Through an analysis of the relationship between nurses and other mental health professions, with an emphasis on nursing scholarship, this book demonstrates the inherently social construction of “mental health,” and highlights the role of nurses in challenging, and complying with, modern approaches to psychiatry. After WWII, heightened cultural and political emphasis on mental health for social stability enabled the development of psychiatric nursing as a distinct knowledge project through which nurses aimed to transform institutional approaches to patient care, and to contribute to health and social science beyond the bedside. Nurses now take for granted the ideas that underpin their relationships with patients, but this book demonstrates that these were ideas not easily won, and that nurses in the past fought hard to make mental health nursing what it is today.
Congratulations to Dr. Chris Suh, Assistant Professor, on receiving the 2020 Laura Jones Hardman Award for Excellence in Service to the Emory Community at the Emory Crystal Apple Awards ceremony earlier this semester. The Crystal Apple Awards honor faculty members who go above and beyond in their search for knowledge and involvement in the Emory community. The awards are sponsored by the Residence Hall Association. Each year, students are asked to nominate their professors based on select criteria.
Congratulations to Dr. Astrid M. Eckert, Associate Professor of History, on being awarded the Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award. The award is presented annually to faculty members in each of the four undergraduate schools in recognition of a record of excellence in undergraduate teaching. The award was established by Emory Williams, a 1932 Emory College alumnus and long-time trustee. Eckert is one of only six faculty on campus to receive the award this year. Read more about the Undergraduate Teaching Award, including past recipients.
Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, Associate Professor of History, recently published a conversation about law in colonial Latin America with Dr. Bianca Premo, Professor of History at Florida International University. Their piece is published as a part of the History and the Law Project within the Exchanges of Economic, Legal and Political Ideas Programme. The conversation includes discussion of Yannakakis’s digital project, “Power of Attorney,” which we featured in 2018: “Recent Faculty Publications: Q & A with Yanna Yannakakis about ‘Power of Attorney.’”
Read the piece by Yannakakis and Premo here: “On not going to court in colonial Spanish America: A conversation between Bianca Premo and Yanna Yannakakis.”
The History Department will host the 2019-20 senior celebration on Wednesday, April 29, from 2-3:30pm via Zoom. Below are a few of the history majors that will be individually recognized at the event. ‘
Phi Alpha Theta, Tau Chapter: 2019-2020 Graduates
Hannah Fuller
Parth Goyal
Junyi Han
Yazmina Sarieh
Emily Sharp
Isaiah Sirois
Abigail Stern
Jonathan Tao
Daniel Thomas
Minnie Yang
2019-2020 Honors Graduates
Drew Bryant
Director: Adriana Chira
“International Activism and the Women’s Human Rights Movement: 1990-2000”
Hannah Fuller
Director: Matthew Payne
“A Tale of Two Trials”
Junyi Han
Director: Tonio Andrade
“Guoshang Cemetery and the Collective Memory of World War II”
Christina Ocean
Director: Valerie Babb, English Dept.
“Martin Luther King, Jr., the Dreamer: The Power Invoked by Dreaming in Black Literature and Culture”
Martin Pimentel
Director: Jason Ward
“Detrioters: The Rise and Fall of the Detroit Rumor Control Center, 1967-1969”
Diego Romero
Director: Yanna Yannakakis
“Feathered Empire: Change in Central Mexico in the 16th Century”
Noah Roos
Director: Matthew Payne
“The Tundra and the Desert: Soviet-Iraq Relations, 1968-1972”
Kate Sandlin
Director: Clifton Crais
“What Are You Afraid Of: Witchcraft Suppression in the Northern Province, South
Africa in the Twentieth Century”
Emily Sharp
Director: Benjamin Reiss, English Dept.
“Roy Cohn’s America: Conservatism, Sexual Politics, and Memory in the Twenty-
First Century”
Isaiah Sirois
Director: Daniel LaChance
“A Little Encouragement in Pulling Themselves Up by Their Own Bootstraps:
American Individualism and Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship”
Jonathan Tao
Director: Tonio Andrade & Cynthia Patterson
“Bactria and the Cultural Legacy of Alexander the Great in the East”
2019-2020 Senior Awards
George P. Cuttino Prize (best record in European history):
Hannah Fuller
James Z. Rabun Prize (best record in American history):
Isaiah Sirois
Latin America & Non-Western World Prize (best record in Latin America & Non-Western World History):
Kate Sandlin
Matthew A. Carter Citizen-Scholar Award (high academic achievement & good works in the community):
Yazmina Sarieh
Senior Junyi Han, a History and Media Studies double major, recently contributed a post to the Fox Center Fellows’ blog about her research. Han is completing her honors thesis on collective memory of World War II in China with a micro-historical study of the Tengchong Guoshang Cemetery, the earliest and largest burial ground in mainland China for Guomindang soldiers killed in World War II. Read the Fox Center’s biography of Han below along with the full article, “Guoshang Cemetery and Chinese Collective Memory, 1945 and Beyond.”
Junyi Han is a senior double majoring History and Media Studies. She is currently working on an honors thesis that examines war memories through the case of the Chinese Expeditionary Forces, a military unit dispatched to Burma and India by the Nationalist government in 1942 in support of the Allied efforts against Japanese invasion in Asia. The thesis will answer how and why the war efforts of the Chinese Expeditionary Force started to be recognized in mainland China in the late twentieth century. It will explore how war memories and post-war politics have mutually shaped each other, and thus provide new insights into contemporary Chinese history.
Dr. Carl Suddler, Assistant Professor of History, recently appeared on The Black Athlete podcast. In this episode, Dr. Suddler joins a conversation about the first episodes of The Last Dance, a 2020 American sports documentary miniseries focusing on the 1997–98 Chicago Bulls. Suddler also addresses the passing of his friend, mentor, and sports historian Dr. Pellom McDaniels, III. Listen to the episode on SoundCloud.
