Category / Alumni

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Alumni Update: Christina Hansen (’02C)

The New York Times goes live from the hack stand…

How do you combine a love of history with your love of horses? Emory History Honors alumna Christina Hansen (’02C) grew up in Lexington, KY. She is a co-founder of Blue Star Equiculture @equiculture, a sanctuary for retired working horses in Palmer, Massachusetts.  Blue Star visits local fairs, schools, and farm markets and gives presentations explaining how “History is Written in Hooves.” Through its partnership with the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at the University of Massachusetts, Blue Star shows future vets and farmers how to care for draft horses.  It runs workshops on equine first aid and pasture management, for instance, and leads eco-tours.  The Sanctuary works with military veterans, seniors, Girl and Boy Scout clubs, and 4-H groups.  If you are in the area, you might like to know that every Saturday Blue Star offers wagon rides at the Sanctuary.  (And if you are looking for a horse, Blue Star runs an adoption program.)

Christina began her career as a horse advocate and carriage driver in historic Philadelphia. She answered an ad that asked, “Do you love horses? Do you love history? Do we have a job for you!” Since her move to NYC 5 years ago, she has become a prominent and active spokesperson for the city’s carriage horses, as well as driving a vintage carriage.  She has appeared often on television and in print media.  In these two New York Times live interviews from the spring of 2017, Christina discusses the history of horses in the city, the regulations that protect them (some of the most comprehensive equine ordinances in the country), and even the nineteenth-century carriage she drives.  The interviews with NYT reporter Masha Goncharova also feature her horses, King and Hoffa. The first live interview was so popular that the NYT made a return visit.  You can follow her on Twitter @carriagecavalry and/or @NYCHorses and on the website she created “Carriage On.” If you look around the website, you also will find tours of their stables. If you are interested, check out the video “Save NYC Horse Carriages,” narrated by Liam Neeson. #CarriageOn  http://carriageon.com/nytlive/

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Edward Hatfield (PhD, ’15) Named Managing Editor of ‘New Georgia Encyclopedia’

Congratulations to Dr. Edward Hatfield, alumnus of the graduate program in American history, for being named managing editor of the New Georgia Encyclopedia. The publication, first launched in 2004, was the first state encyclopedia designed for the web. The project is run by the Georgia Humanities Council. Hatfield was an advisee of Dr. Joseph Crespino.

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Ben Nobbs-Thiessen (PhD 2016) Wins Dissertation Award

Congratulations to Dr. Ben Nobbs-Thiessen for winning the 2016 Gilbert C. Fite Award for the best dissertation on agricultural history from the Agricultural History Society. He completed his dissertation, “The Cultivated State, Migrants and the Transformation of the Bolivian Lowlands, 1952-2000,” in 2016 under the advisement of Drs. Jeffrey Lesser, Peter Little, Thomas D. Rogers, and Yanna Yannakakis. Read the below for a more detailed explanation of Nobbs-Thiessen’s research:

My research explores the role of migrants in the “March to the East” a large-scale settlement and rural development initiative undertaken by the Bolivian state after 1952.  Over half a century hundreds of thousands of settlers arrived in the tropical Department of Santa Cruz in Bolivia’s Eastern Lowlands to begin new lives as frontier farmers.  Among the migrants were indigenous Bolivians from the nation’s highlands, low-German speaking Mennonites from Canada, Paraguay and Mexico as well as groups of Japanese and Okinawan colonists that had been re-settled with support from the Japanese government and the U.S. military.  Together these diverse streams made the March to the East a uniquely transnational affair and a compelling case study for understanding migration and mid-century rural modernization.

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Alumni Update: Dr. Glen Goodman (PhD, 2015) Wins Fulbright and German Academic Exchange Service Grants

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The History Department sends its congratulations to Emory alumnus Glen Goodman, Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Goodman won a Fulbright grant to teach in the graduate program in History at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, located in Porto Alegre, during the spring semester 2018. In addition, the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) awarded Goodman a research grant to conduct archival work in Berlin during the summer of 2017. Goodman was an advisee of Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Department Chair and Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History.

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PhD Alumnus Adam T. Rosenbaum on Mentoring the Senior Thesis in ‘Perspectives on History’

PhD alumnus (’11) Adam T. Rosenbaum published an article in the March edition of Perspectives on History, the newsmagazine of the American Historical Association. The publication, “Leading by Example: The Senior Thesis and the Teacher-Scholar,” charts Rosenbaum’s novel approach to teaching a seminar in which undergraduates write a capstone thesis. Rosenbaum was recently tenured at Colorado Mesa University and his book, Bavarian Tourism and the Modern World, 1800–1950, was published by Cambridge UP in 2016. Check out an excerpt below and read the full piece in Perspectives here.

“As I prepared to teach the course a second time, I decided to make some changes. I rewrote the syllabus with a narrower focus on the history of the Third Reich, abandoning the topical flexibility of the first incarnation. I created a five-page bibliography of English-language sources related to that subject, providing students with a significant head start. Then I had another idea: I would write a thesis paper alongside my students, completing all the assignments along the way.”

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Dr. Erica Bruchko (PhD Alumna) Featured by Emory News Center

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The Emory News Center recently profiled Erica Bruchko, a graduate of Emory’s History Graduate program and now the African American Studies and U.S. history librarian at Emory. The article, titled “Erica Bruchko: Helping researchers in Emory Libraries’ African American, history collections,” charts Bruchko’s trajectory from her time as an undergraduate in South Carolina through her recent work expanding Emory’s impressive library collections. Read the full article here.

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Alumni Update: William S. Cossen (BA ’08)

William S. Cossen graduated from Emory University in 2008 with majors in political science and history. In December of 2016 he finished a PhD in history from Penn State University. His family, now including two children, is now back in the Atlanta area. Cossen is a faculty member of The Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology, and his spouse is a pediatric endocrinological fellow at Egleston Children’s Hospital at Emory. Gossen recently published the following article: “Catholic Gatekeepers: The Church and Immigration Reform in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” U.S. Catholic Historian 34, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 1-23. He is currently revising his first book manuscript, The Protestant Image in the Catholic Mind: Hegemony, Identity, and Catholic Nation Building in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

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Alumna Sarah Van Dell on Beijing, UNO, and Serena Williams in ‘Medium’

Emory History Department alumna Sarah Van Dell, a former History major and Chinese Studies minor, recently published a terrific piece on the website Medium. The article, “22 Grand Slams? How I Beat Serena in UNO — at the Beijing airport,” chronicles Dell’s journey to Beijing to cover the China Open – the city’s first major tennis event – shortly after graduating in 2004. Enjoy the article here.

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Dr. Belle Tuten (PhD alumna) on “The Mansplaining Hordes”

Dr. Belle Tuten,  W. Newton and Hazel A. Long Professor of History at Juniata College, wrote a piece “The Mansplaining Hordes” on the blog Smart Women Talking. Tuten received her PhD from Emory’s History Department in the 1990s with Steve White. Read an excerpt of the post below and check out Tuten’s full post.

“As a college professor I have the luxury of having at least some claim to knowledge about my own expertise on my own turf (although many college students may not consider it knowledge worth having; that is a different problem). But I’m a professor in the humanities. There is certainly a different conundrum for my female and non-binary colleagues and colleagues of color in the social and natural sciences. I cannot help but think that as the humanities have more and more female etc. professors, the humanities get more and more sidelined by the “real” [read: quantitative?] social and physical sciences, from which female and nonbinary students and students of color are dropping out at demonstrably higher rates than straight white male ones. Is that also a statement on the nature of authority?”

 

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Roark Prize, Endowed by Young Alumni, Established to Support Undergraduate Research

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Retiring Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of American History, Dr. Jim Roark, will be honored with a scholarship for undergraduate research bearing his name. The Roark Prize will support rising seniors in the History Department pursuing research in the United States relating to their honors thesis. The idea for the prize originated with two former history students, Ben Leiner (’14) and Naveed Amalfard (’14), who counted Roark as an inspiring mentor and professor. Read the Emory News Center’s full report on the prize here.