Zach Domach graduated in 2013 with a BA/MA, Highest Honors, in Classics/History.  He was the winner of the 2012-2013 Cuttino Prize in the History Department. Currently he is earning a Master of Studies in Theology: Ecclesiastical History at the University of Oxford. At Oxford he is a member of Trinity College, where he holds the George and Apphia Woodruffe Scholarship in Theology (no relation to Emory’s George Woodruff) and is also jointly funded (in addition to the Woodruffe Scholarship) by an Arts & Humanities Research Council award. Zach plays the double bass in the Oxford University Orchestra, the Oxford University Philharmonia, and the Oxford Millennium Orchestra. He is learning a new language this year: Syriac, which is a dialect of Aramaic related to Hebrew and Arabic.  He is also currently applying to PhD programs in the States (in History, Classics, and Religion depending on the school/program).

The photos are from his Summer 2013 spent doing archaeology in Greece.

Hiking in glorious SW Colorado!

Adam Rosenbaum received his PhD from Emory in 2011. He studied modern German history and his dissertation “Timeless, Modern, and German? The Re-Mapping of Bavaria through the Marketing of Tourism, 1800-1939,” has won two major prizes: the Parker-Schmitt Dissertation Prize awarded by the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association, and the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize awarded by the Friends of the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. Adam is currently working at Colorado Mesa University as an assistant professor of modern European and Asian history, where he has taught a variety of classes over the course of the last two years, ranging from East Asia and the Modern World to Tourism and Identity in Modern Europe. He is in the process of revising his dissertation into a book manuscript, and has two forthcoming articles, one in the Spring 2013 issue of The Bulletin of the German Historical Institute and another in the March 2014 issue of Central European History.

 

John Gibson, who graduated in 2010 with Honors in History, is currently in Switzerland on a Fulbright-Swiss Government Research Grant for 2011-2012. He is associated with the Institut d’histoire of the Université de Neuchâtel and the Historisches Institut of the Universität Bern, and has been going to the archives almost every day for his research on diplomatic networks of the French Revolution. This hasn’t kept him from enjoying Switzerland’s magnificent scenery on the weekends, however.

Nancy Locklin (PhD 2000) has just published an article, “‘Til death parts us’: Women’s Domestic Partnerships in Eighteenth-Century Brittany,” in the Journal of Women’s History, Winter 2011 (volume 23, issue 4). In even bigger news, she and her husband have adopted a baby boy from Russia. Congratulations on both counts, Nancy!

Neal Robin (B.A. 2007) served as editorial producer for “Elusive Justice: The Search for Nazi War Criminals,” a documentary premiering Tuesday, November 15 (at 9PM on PBS; check for local listings) that chronicles the 65-year effort to identify, prosecute, and punish Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust.

After the end of WWII, the international community failed to uphold its pledge to prosecute and punish suspected Nazi war criminals. Thousands of Nazi officials fled to safe havens around the world, assuming false identities and concealing their war records to evade exposure.  The documentary explores how and why this happened, as well as profiles the men and women who, in the face of apathy and violence, pursued Nazis on their own terms when official institutions failed to enforce its laws.  The film includes interviews with suspected war criminals and their defenders, government investigators and prosecutors, intelligence officers, so-called Nazi-hunters, and Holocaust survivors.

As editorial producer, Neal conducted on-camera interviews, coordinated story assignments (including overseas assignments), located archival footage, and researched trials and investigations of suspected Nazi perpetrators to incorporate into the film.

Neal says, “My background in history served as an indispensable background for me during the documentary production, and will continue to be invaluable in all my educational and professional endeavors.  I read historical accounts of groups of people who were abused and disenfranchised for bigoted reasons, and whose memory served as a basis on which future generations attempted to raise the moral and social consciousness to issues of injustice.  I drew on the lessons I learned in class by listening to firsthand accounts of those who bore witness to crimes as they unfolded, and then trying to understand the stories behind them.”

Congratulations to Jeffrey Reznick (PhD 1999) for his new appointment as Chief of the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. Previous to this appointment he was Deputy Chief and then Acting Chief of the History of Medicine Division of the NLM, and has an extensive background in the social and cultural history of medicine. He has also served as senior curator at the National Museum of Health and Medicine of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Executive Director and Senior Research Fellow at the Orthotic and Prosthetic Assistance Fund, and as the assistant director of the former Institute of Comparative and International Studies at Emory. He is the author of John Galsworthy and Disabled Soldiers of the Great War: With an Illustrated Selection of His Writings (2009) and Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the Great War (2005) as well as many articles on the history of medicine and war.

Jerome V. Reel, Jr. (Ph.D. 1967) has received the South Carolina Humanities Council award for his outstanding service to humanities education and knowledge through his 48 years of teaching at Clemson University, his six books, several chapters in books, and a dozen articles for scholarly and popular magazines on historical topics ranging from 14th century Britain, higher education history, opera and general music history, to the effects of the Arthurian legend through music and popular festivals. Although retired since 2006, he continues to teach almost every semester at Clemson in response to student requests. His most recent book, The High Seminary: A History of the Clemson Agricultural College of South Carolina, 1889-1964 (June 2011) has sold its first printing; a second is at the press.

Rebecca Shumway (PhD 2004) has just celebrated two big events in her life: the publication of her first book, The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Rochester University Press) and the birth of her son Derek (Kwei) Shumway Handley on September 14. We congratulate Rebecca on a highly productive and impressive year!

 

Andrew Fleming, BA 2007, who wrote his Honors thesis under Prof. Clifton Crais on patterns of rural land tenure and their political/economic/social consequences in the Glen Grey District of 19th Century South Africa, moved to Cape Town after graduation. He worked for three years in a small private equity fund manager oriented towards socially-empowering investments and aimed at job creation through entrepreneurial support and funding. In May 2010 he left South Africa to do a summer¹s worth of backpacking around the Middle East and Europe, followed by the reading for an MSc in Urbanisation and Development at the London School of Economics. He writes:

“My focus for my Master’s dissertation was on low-income housing in the Global South: Specifically, I have examined a rise in evictions from private low-income rental housing in Woodstock, one of Cape Town’s urban neighborhoods. This has proven to be developmentally problematic, placing evictees in the distant urban periphery away from jobs, healthcare, education, and family support, where gender-based and drug-fuelled violence is on the increase. The evictions are also problematic for South Africa’s post-Apartheid spatial development: Not only do the evictions continue to divide the geographical city by class, but also implicitly perpetuate imperial/colonial patterns of land use and occupation. An examination into the ways in which these evictions are taking place (largely outside of the general public awareness) and their on-the-ground consequences is vital for understanding the many ways in which South Africa’s society continues to perpetuate patterns of imperial spatial use under the guises of a neoliberal economic development agenda. Exploring not only the developmental problems associated with low-income housing evictions and displacement, but also the historical roots of the evictions in question, will open up a more solutions-oriented and creative discussion on the ways in which residential and city space can be shared by citizens from multiple income levels, interacting across different social platforms and stages.”

Andrew recently began a new job as the Senior Researcher at the Cape Town Partnership, a Public-Private Non-profit organization with the overall goal of promoting Cape Town as an inclusive and productive space in which to work, live, and interact. He will be focusing specifically on research into the ways in which the City Centre has become a more inclusive urban area for a greater number of South Africans through not only an increase in businesses coming into the city (and thus an increase in job opportunities) but also how new research initiatives and cross-institutional collaboration will lead to a growth of new and creative solutions for uniquely African urban challenges.

Chris Snyder, who received his PhD in Medieval History in 1994 under Prof. Tom Burns, is beginning his new position at Mississippi State’s Shackouls Honors College as its founding dean. Chris is an authority on early medieval Britain and has published a number of books, including An Age of Tyrants: Britain and the Britons, A.D. 400-600 (1998) and The World of King Arthur (2000) and was the General Editor of The Early Peoples of Britain and Ireland: An Encyclopedia (2008). Before arriving at Mississippi State, Chris was professor of European history and director of the honors program at Marymount University in Arlington, VA.