In June of 2019 Oxford University Press will publish the first book of Sean Andrew Wempe, a 2015 doctoral program alumnus. Wempe’s monograph is entitled Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations. Benedikt Stuchtey, Professor at Philipps-University Marburg, Germany, describes Revenants as a “timely and meticulously researched book based on a wide array of archival material.” Wempe is currently Assistant Professor of Modern European History at California State University–Bakersfield. Read the publisher’s description of the book below.

In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles stripped Germany of its overseas colonies. This sudden transition to a post-colonial nation left the men and women invested in German imperialism to rebuild their status on the international stage. Remnants of an earlier era, these Kolonialdeutsche (Colonial Germans) exploited any opportunities they could to recover, renovate, and market their understandings of German and European colonial aims in order to reestablish themselves as “experts” and “fellow civilizers” in discourses on nationalism and imperialism.

Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations tracks the difficulties this diverse group of Colonial Germans encountered while they adjusted to their new circumstances, as repatriates to Weimar Germany or as subjects of the War’s victors in the new African Mandates. Faced with novel systems of international law, Colonial Germans re-situated their notions of imperial power and group identity to fit in a world of colonial empires that were not their own. The book examines how former colonial officials, settlers, and colonial lobbies made use of the League of Nations framework to influence diplomatic flashpoints including the Naturalization Controversy in Southwest Africa, the Locarno Conference, and the Permanent Mandates Commission from 1927-1933.

Sean Wempe revises standard historical portrayals of the League of Nations’ form of international governance, German participation in the League, the role of interest groups in international organizations and diplomacy, and liberal imperialism. In analyzing Colonial German investment and participation in interwar liberal internationalism, the project challenges the idea of a direct continuity between Germany’s colonial period and the Nazi era.

Dr. Debjani Bhattacharyya, Assistant Professor of History at Drexel University and a 2014 graduate of Emory’s PhD program, published Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta with Cambridge University Press in 2018. Maya Jasanoff, the Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University, recently featured Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta in an article in The New York Review of Books. Bhattacharyya was advised by Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History Jeffrey Lesser. Read an excerpt of Jasanoff’s review below along with the full article, “Lost Calcutta.”

“In her innovative new book, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta, Debjani Bhattacharyya, a professor of history at Drexel University, describes how Bengalis had their own story about Calcutta’s origins. “Legend has it that the city was born when the ocean started churning, and a tortoise,” pressed between the mountains and the force of Ananta, the infinite, “gasped out a deep breath.” Its breath made the Bengal Delta, a vast 40,000-square-mile area where the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers seep into the Bay of Bengal. This legend, like the legend of Job Charnock, also carries an element of truth: Calcutta rests on shifting ground. It should be no surprise that its fortunes have shifted too.”

Dr. Lisa Greenwald, a Emory History PhD alumna and teacher at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, recently published Daughters of 1968: Redefining French Feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement with the University of Nebraska Press. Karen Offen, Senior Scholar at the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, writes that Daughters of 1968 “introduces anglophone audiences to the breadth and depth of second-wave feminism in France. Her bold analysis encompasses much more than theory by restoring to us the complexity of the activist components of the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes.” The book emerged from more than a decade working in and researching the women’s movement in France, including with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and grants from the French government. Read the full description from the publisher below.

Daughters of 1968 is the story of French feminism between 1944 and 1981, when feminism played a central political role in the history of France. The key women during this epoch were often leftists committed to a materialist critique of society and were part of a postwar tradition that produced widespread social change, revamping the workplace and laws governing everything from abortion to marriage.

The May 1968 events—with their embrace of radical individualism and antiauthoritarianism—triggered a break from the past, and the women’s movement split into two strands. One became universalist and intensely activist, the other particularist and less activist, distancing itself from contemporary feminism. This theoretical debate manifested itself in battles between women and organizations on the streets and in the courts.

The history of French feminism is the history of women’s claims to individualism and citizenship that had been granted their male counterparts, at least in principle, in 1789. Yet French women have more often donned the mantle of particularism, adducing their contributions as mothers to prove their worth as citizens, than they have thrown it off, claiming absolute equality. The few exceptions, such as Simone de Beauvoir or the 1970s activists, illustrate the diversity and tensions within French feminism, as France moved from a corporatist and tradition-minded country to one marked by individualism and modernity.

Dr. Christopher A. Snyder, Dean of the Shackouls Honors College at Mississippi State University and Professor of History, recently published Gatsby’s Oxford: Scott, Zelda, and the Jazz Age Invasion of Britain: 1904–1929 with Pegasus/Penguin. Snyder received his PhD in Medieval History from Emory in 1994. Read the publisher’s summary of Gatsby’s Oxford – Snyder’s eighth monograph – below along with a press release from the University of Mississippi: “MSU’s Snyder holding April book signings for ‘Gatsby’s Oxford.’”

The poet T.S. Eliot. The polo star Tommy Hitchcock. F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. This diverse group of Americans came to Oxford in the first quarter of the twentieth century—the Jazz Age—when the Rhodes Scholar program had just begun and the Great War had enveloped much of Europe. Scott Fitzgerald created his most memorable character—Jay Gatsby, the Oxford man in the pink suit—shortly after his and Zelda’s visit to Oxford. Fitzgerald’s creation is a cultural reflection of the aspirations of many Americans who came to the University of Oxford seeking beauty, wisdom, and social connections.

Beginning in 1904, when the first American Rhodes Scholars arrived in Oxford, this book chronicles the experiences of Americans in Oxford through the Great War and the years of recovery to 1929, the end of Prohibition and the beginning of the Great Depression. This period is interpreted through the pages of The Great Gatsby, producing a vivid cultural history. It shows just how much Fitzgerald, the quintessential American modernist author, owes a debt to the medieval, the Romantic, and the European historical tradition. Archival material covering the American Rhodes Scholars who came to Oxford during Trinity Term 1919—when Jay Gatsby claims he studied at Oxford—enables the narrative to illuminate a detailed portrait of what a “historical Gatsby” would have looked like, what he would have experienced at the postwar university, and who he would have encountered around Oxford—an impressive array of artists including Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Winston Churchill, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis.