Graduate student Olivia Cocking has won a Farrar Memorial Award from the Society for French Historical Studies to continue her dissertation research in France. Her project, “Droits assurés, droits bafoués: Race, Nationality, and the Right to Living Well in France After Empire,” has involved research in Paris, Lille, and Marseilles thus far. Cocking has presented her work at the French Colonial Historical Society Conference (Martinique) and the European Association for Urban History Conference (Antwerp, Belgium). Cocking also holds a 3-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship. Her dissertation committee is co-chaired by Professors Tehila Sasson and Judith Miller and includes Prof. Mariana Candido.
The History Department was pleased to receive an update from Dr. Daniel Krebs (Ph.D. 2007). Krebs writes that a year ago, he “left the University of Louisville, and my fairly narrow confines of early American military history, and joined the faculty of the Department of National Security & Strategy at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, PA. My new position focuses much more generally on military history, security, strategy, defense, policy, and particularly on regional studies, especially in Europe. I am also the overall director of the advanced regional studies program. This program sends our students around the world on various trips and courses to learn about the strategic environment in other regions. Our students are all senior leaders in the U.S. military and government. Lieutenant Colonels and Colonels (or civilian equivalents) with 20+ years of experience in the military and government. We also have students from partner and allied nations in each of our courses. All students earn a Masters in Security Studies during a year-long stay in Carlisle. So, I went from teaching young BAs & MAs to adult education. From civilian state university to professional military education within the Federal Government/Department of Defense. From ivory tower academia to an institution that is much more concerned with contemporary policy-making and strategy. From thinking about history in the traditional sense to thinking about how history can be applied for strategic decision-making.”
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Pimentel at a youth climate workshop focused on women’s climate adaptation in Morocco
The History Department was pleased to receive an update from Marty Pimentel, a History major who graduated from the College in 2020. After graduating Pimentel went to Georgetown for a master’s degree in Arab Studies. After two years of classes, a year abroad in Morocco, and another thesis, he graduated in May 2023 with distinction. He spent a year in Morocco doing fieldwork for his graduate thesis and did more fieldwork in Morocco last fall. He was there researching environmental civil society and spoke with some incredibly inspiring people. Now he is starting a new full-time position as a Program Manager and Research Associate with the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, one of the premier foreign policy and international affairs think tanks in DC.
Are you an Emory History alum? Please send us updates on your life and work!
The Emory University History Department is proud to celebrate Dr. Marissa L. Nichols, a 2023 alum, on being awarded a 2024 ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The ACLS Fellowship Program supports scholars who are poised to make original and significant contributions to knowledge in any field of the humanities or interpretive social sciences.
Nichols has been recognized as one of 60 exceptional early-career scholars selected through a multi-stage peer review from a pool of 1,100 applicants. ACLS Fellowships provide up to $60,000 to support scholars during six to 12 months of sustained research and writing. Awardees who do not hold tenure-track faculty appointments receive a supplement of $7,500 for research or other personal costs incurred during their award term.
Nichols currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Healthcare History and Policy in Emory’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. The ACLS fellowship will support the writing of her book project, “The Backbone of Rural Health: Nursing and Indigenous Healing in Oaxaca.” Based on her dissertation, which was advised by Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, the manuscript traces how rural nurses and Indigenous communities shaped the expansion of rural healthcare in mid-twentieth-century Oaxaca, Mexico. It relies on research from archives and libraries in Mexico as well as oral histories conducted primarily as part of her dissertation research.
“The applications we received this year were nothing short of inspiring – a powerful reminder of the capacity of humanistic research to illuminate and deepen understanding of the workings of our world” said John Paul Christy, Senior Director of US Programs at ACLS. “As scholars face increasing challenges to pursuing and disseminating their research, we remain committed to advancing their vital work.”
The History Department was pleased to receive an update from Kate Nowak, a former History major who graduated from the College in 2019. Since graduation, Nowak has been working as a defense paralegal with Swift, Currie, McGhee, & Hiers in Atlanta. She works directly with two firm partners to manage their caseload. She is thankful for the analytical thinking and writing skills that she honed in the Emory History Department. She puts them to use daily in legal work. She was also elected as Paralegal Liaison and enjoys building interpersonal connections with her team as well as with new hires through firm training programs and meetings.
Are you an Emory History alum? Please send us updates on your life and work!
The History Department was delighted to receive an update from Dr. Alex Borucki, a 2011 alumnus of the graduate program and Professor of History at the University of California Irvine. Read Borucki’s update below:
“I have worked in collaborative research since my days in Bowden Hall by witnessing the creation of the Slave Voyages website fifteen years ago, but I engaged in a radically different way of teamwork more recently.
“In 2021, the writer/cartoonist/marketing mastermind Gonzalo Eyherabide asked me for historical guidance because he was creating a graphic history, or historieta histórica in Spanish, about Joaquín Artigas, an African man who had fought in the wars of independence in the early 1800s Uruguay, and who was enslaved to the family of Uruguay’s founding father, José Artigas.
“As a result of two years of emails and discussions, Gonzalo adapted my article about the U.S. slave ship Ascension to recreate the story of Joaquín’s enslavement in Mozambique (because we knew Joaquín was from there) and, subsequently, his forced crossing of the South Atlantic.
“Early in 2023, Artigas: Un Patriota sin Patria was published in Montevideo, selling 3000 copies in a semester, and a second edition was released by the end of 2023. I met Gonzalo while visiting Montevideo last December when he gifted me a copy of his beautiful work. He also drew on the first blank page of the book a fine depiction of me and him talking in the bar next to the Río de la Plata, or River Plate, where we usually met. He added this inscription: ‘Culture is and must be generosity and solidarity,’ which encapsulates some of the best collaborative research outcomes.”
Dr. Julia Lopez Fuentes, a 2020 graduate of the History doctoral program and upper school teacher at the National Cathedral School, was recently awarded the 2023 European Studies First Article Prize in the Social Sciences by the Council for European Studies at Columbia University. The article, “’A Forgetting for Everyone, by Everyone’? Spain’s Memory Laws and the Rise of the European Community of Memory, 1977–2007,” was published in The Journal of Modern History in 2022. Drs. Walter L. Adamson and Astrid M. Eckert advised Fuentes’s doctoral work, including a 2015 graduate paper in which she first conducted the research and analysis that would culminate in the 2022 article. Read the abstract of this impressive scholarly contribution below. Congratulations, Dr. Fuentes!
“Historians and other scholars of memory have worked extensively on European memory politics, especially around transnational issues such as the Holocaust, as well as on Spanish memory politics, most recently in light of the exhumation of former dictator Francisco Franco. Yet there has been little scholarship to date on how nationally specific incidents, such as the Spanish Civil War and Franco regime, fit into wider trans-European narratives. This article reveals the entanglements between these local and supranational developments by examining the evolution of Spain’s memory laws and discourse, from the 1977 Amnesty Law that followed the end of the Franco regime to the 2007 Law of Historical Memory, in relation to contemporaneous European memorialization patterns. It argues that the shift from a discourse of forgetting in the Amnesty Law to one of commemoration in the Law of Historical Memory is a response to the rise of a European culture of memorialization rather than reflecting an evolution in Spain’s memory regime. By analyzing the development, text, and application of these laws, along with the political and cultural debates surrounding them in Spain and throughout Europe, this article reveals how the 2007 Spanish Law of Historical Memory, despite appearing to espouse European discourses of memorialization and amends-making, perpetuates a system of disremembering that predates most contemporary European memory politics. Ultimately, the article argues that the Law of Historical Memory suppresses the voices of victims of the Franco regime in order to bolster a narrative of Spanish national unity and European belonging.”
Belle Stoddard Tuten (PhD, 1997) recently shared an update about her life and work, along with the same of her husband, Jim Tuten (PhD, 2003). Enjoy her reflection below:
“I have been a faculty member at Juniata College in Huntingdon, PA since my graduation in 1997. Right now, I am Charles A. Dana Professor of History, which I have been since (I think) 2017. I serve as the chair of our department of history and art history. I am the only premodern scholar at my school and try to spread the ancient history and medieval history around as much as I can. My most popular class right now is Medieval Medicine, which counts for our Medical Humanities minor and attracts a lot of STEM students. Ancient Rome runs a close second! Since 2010 I have mostly worked in the history of medicine, although I published a book,Daily Life of Women in Medieval Europe, in 2022 for the Greenwood Press’s imprint on Daily Life. I am considering whether to condense my research on the breast in the Middle Ages into book form.
“Jim Tuten has been at Juniata since 1998. He held an administrative role for some years before moving into the faculty. He is Charles and Shirley Knox Professor of History and has his fingers in tons of pies, including recently publishing a guide book to a local historic railroad (written 80% by students!) and serving as the chair of the Major Fellowships committee. He continues his work in food history, recently speaking in Madeira, Portugal, at a conference on the history of Madeira wine.”
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The History Department was delighted to receive an update from Kelly Damon Caiazzo, a 2005 graduate. Read Kelly’s update below:
“When I graduated from Emory’s History program, I had a great appreciation for history but hadn’t taken much part in it myself. Almost 2 decades later, I find that my background in history has helped me look for meaningful ways to contribute as I live through it. During the PPE shortage in the early phases of Covid-19, my community mobilized to sew cloth PPE for essential workers, then family and friends. I have never felt as close to the women who inspired Rosie the Riveter as I did bent over my sewing machine late at night wondering if my work could save a life. Cars pulled in and out of my driveway as people picked up sewing kits I created, or dropped off fabric donations.
Masks that Kelley sewed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We were part of history, contributing what we could as we worried about the world. Our background in history provides us with context for how things have been achieved in the past. It can empower us with ideas for how to spark change and remind us that that the small actions of many individuals create movements that are necessary for progress. In the time since I’ve graduated, I’ve knocked on doors and written letters to encourage voter turnout, called senators, volunteered for a rape crisis hotline, and created a dinner and documentary series to promote environmental activism in my town. I’ve led efforts that brought speakers on anti-racism and LGBTQUIA+ inclusion to my children’s school and served on the board of several non-profits. I do this in part because I learned from my professors at Emory how important we all are. We are all part of history. We are bystanders, witnesses, activists, writers and teachers. From Bowden Hall out into the world, we can use what we’ve learned to make progress.”
Are you an Emory History alumnus? Please send us updates on your life and work!
Dr. Rafael Ioris, a 2009 doctoral program alum and Professor of History at the University of Denver, recently sent an update to the History Department. Since completing his PhD, Ioris has authored Qual Desenvolvimento? Os Debates, Sentidos e Lições da Era Desenvolvimentista (Paco Editorial, 2017) and Transforming Brazil: A History of National Development in the Postwar Era (Routledge, 2014). He has also published two edited volumes on the history of development in Brazil and in the Amazon region, Frontiers of Development in the Amazon: Riches, Risks, and Resistances (Lexington Book, 2020) and Amazonia no Seculo XXI: Trajetorias, Dilemas e Perspectivas (Alameda, 2022). Ioris has, additionally, expanded his collaborations as a Research Fellow with two institutions: the Institute for the Study of the United States in Brazil and the Washington Brazil Office. He spent the fall of 2022 as a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Advanced Latin American Studies at the Sorbonne University (l’Institut des Hautes Études de l’Amérique latine). Now he is preparing to undertake a new book project on Brazil-US relations in the Cold War. He writes that he hopes everyone is doing well back at Emory and looks forward to staying in touch!
Are you an Emory History alumnus? Please send us updates on your life and work!
