Patrick Jamieson, B.A. 2011, is pursuing a J.D. at Duke Law School and a M.A. in History from the graduate school at Duke.  His senior thesis, “’The Delicacy of the Subject’: Creating a Proslavery Argument at Antebellum Emory,” received Highest Honors.  He writes, “I hope that the combination of traditional legal education and graduate study of history will allow me to further explore not only the influences of history on the law, but the ways such influences will be relevant in the changing law of tomorrow.  I hope to continue my focus on the nineteenth century U.S. South, perhaps looking to the connections between antebellum property law and the slave trade.”

Kirsten Cooper, Class of 2012, is spending the summer of 2011 doing historical research with the SIRE Summer Research Partner Program. She will work 40 hours per week on two projects: one under the direction of Dr. Tonio Andrade and the other an independent pursuit. She has worked with Dr. Andrade over the past year on his comparative exploration of military development in Europe and Asia, looking specifically to see whether or not the Military Revolution was a purely European phenomenon. Her independent research will focus more on military and diplomatic relations between France and Austria, and their consequences on various facets of society and national consciousness over the approximately 250 years leading up to the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756. She will also study the effects that this event had on the two societies. This research will help inform her upcoming honors thesis. She explains that she “is very excited to get the opportunity to work full time on both of these projects and to spend the summer in our amazing city of Atlanta!” Last summer, she went to Vienna with the German Studies program and began learning German (taking 101 and 102 while abroad), which she has continued at Emory over the past year. She writes, “It was an amazing experience and I absolutely fell in love with the city, its culture, and its history.” As part of her work, she conducted an independent survey course of Austrian and Habsburg History with the help of Robert A. Kann’s A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526-1918. She enjoyed eating in the Naschmarkt, a lovely open air market with great restaurants, and riding the Strassenbahn through the city.  The obligatory tourist stop at the Café Sacher for their famous Sacher-Torte was a special treat.

Kate Armstrong, Ph.D. 2011, writes that she is thrilled to have completed her doctorate, directed by Professor James Roark. The dissertation is entitled, “Thy Will Lord, Not Mine: Parents, Grief, and Child Death in the Antebellum South.” The research for her project took her to archives in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. It was supported by fellowships from Duke University’s Sallie Bingham Center, UNC-Chapel Hill’s Southern Historical Collection, and Emory. The dissertation investigates the emotions and experiences of planter-class parents of the Old South as they grieved the death of a child, and argues that southern parents’ profound difficulty aligning their feelings of loss with the expectations of their society–particularly the expectation that parents must resign themselves to God’s will–defined their grief. Although Kate is looking forward to revising her thesis for publication, she is also happy to focus on her own, very healthy child for a little while as she figures out her next career move.

William S. Cossen, B.A. in History and Political Science, 2008, is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in history at The Pennsylvania State University. He is focusing on twentieth-century American religious history.

Jim Crooks, B.A. 1998, History, and High Honors in Physics, went on to get a Ph.D. in physics from UNC Chapel Hill, but switched gears and now has a position at the Environmental Protection Agency, in the Office of Research and Development. He will be part of a biostatistics core facility that provides internal consulting for other agency scientists.  He writes, “Most of what I’ll be doing will be epidemiology and bioinformatics, though it strongly depends on who asks for help.”  During his most recent job search, he found that one of the aspects of his CV that the “interviewers zeroed in on was a 2nd place award for best essay on Byzantine history that I received while taking Dr. Burns’ class.  They found this very reassuring; they were concerned (with some justification) that someone with strong mathematical skills would necessarily be a poor communicator and have narrow interests. Apparently the award convinced them otherwise because I was offered the job.”  He and his family enjoy life in the Research Triangle area.  He writes, “I have two sons, ages 3 and 6, who are a delight.  They are protected by a guard-bunny named Hop.  My wife is a human geneticist at Duke, though she will soon be starting a new job at UNC Hospital.  We love going to the theater, staying involved with the school system, and being generally over-scheduled.”

He explains that “Durham has–quite unexpectedly–become the hip corner of the Triangle over the last five years.  Downtown has come back to life.  The arts scene is thriving.  And the restaurants… you would be stunned by the selection and quality we have now.  Where else can you get a chana masala taco prepared in a red school bus-turned-taco truck?”  He concludes, “Neither my wife nor I will ever forget the amazing summer we spent digging up a Roman villa in Pecs, Hungary as part of an Emory history department study abroad!”

Pearl Young, B.A./M.A. 2010, writes that “It’s been a year of celebration! This year, 2011, Emory turns 175 years old. As assistant to Emory Vice President Gary Hauk, I’ve had the pleasure of hunting down interesting tidbits of Emory history, from putting together a  list of the first 175 professors to compiling a calendar of “Today in Emory History“. There have been some truly amazing things that have happened here at Emory, and as a proud Emory alumna, it’s been fascinating to learn more about Emory’s past! We’re home to one of the original primate research centers and are also one of the first schools to study law and religion as a unit; we have alumni who have served as vice president of the United States, as fashion designers, as Pulitzer Prize winners, and more! And, to be sure, there’s much Emory trivia as well. For example, April’s Fools may seem like the perfect day to announce yet another ludicrous claim in the Emory Wheel, but it’s also the anniversary of the original celebration of the formal transfer of Emory College to Emory University.”

In the fall, Pearl will be starting a history Ph.D. program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She writes, “I’m looking forward to being in a new place and studying something different. But I know that my heart will often be turning around old Emory’s shrine.”

Robert Elder, Ph.D. 2011, had an article accepted to the Journal of Southern History. He is taking a two-year postdoctoral position in the Lilly Fellows Program at Valparaiso University in Indiana. His dissertation examines the intersection of evangelicalism and honor culture in the nineteenth century American South, under the direction of Professor James Roark.

Scott Gavorsky, Ph.D. 2009, has been teaching at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He has an article forthcoming, “L’État comme propriétaire?: Schools as Property in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Institutions and Power in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture, eds. Kate Griffiths and David Evans (Rodopi, 2011). He has presented papers at recent Society for French Historical Studies conferences in Arizona and Charleston. In addition to teaching at Anchorage, he organized the Phi Alpha Theta Second Annual Alaska State Conference in February 2011.  The Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward, Alaska has an annual fundraiser, an Indoor Mini-Golf Tournament. A number of the history faculty put together a team and participated in the tournament in March 2011. There was also a contest for “best golfing attire,” which they won with their “EiderDons” theme.

Jeremy Pool, Ph.D. 2009, writes that he was thrilled to take part in the Commencement Ceremony last spring. He and his wife are currently living in Minneapolis, while he works at the Minnesota History Center Museum and she works at the University of Minnesota Law Library. He was recently awarded a two-year Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship through the Associated Colleges of the Midwest to serve as an instructor at Monmouth College in Illinois, so they will be moving there in the fall.  At Monmouth, he will be teaching three courses a year in African and Atlantic World history, serving as a resource for students and faculty and further developing his own scholarship. He has submitted an article on education and nation building, currently under review for a special issue of Ghana Studies on Kwame Nkrumah’s leadership in Ghana. Now he is working on a second article on the 1948 Cape Coast school strikes, and beginning the long process of transforming his dissertation into a book manuscript.

Christina Welsch, B.A. 2010, has received the Adolph G. Rosengarten Jr. fellowship at Princeton University, where she is pursuing a doctorate. The fellowship is awarded every year for outstanding graduate work in history.  In 2011, she will participate in the Summer Language Program run by the American Institute of Indian Studies.  She will work on Mughal Persian in Lucknow, India.  While a student at Emory, she held a George P. Cuttino Scholarship, which gave her the chance to do research in the India Office Records in both the National Archives of New Delhi and in the British Library in London.  A Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship allowed her to make a short trip to Kolkata, where she could investigate sites related to her research. As a participant in the SIRE Program at Emory, she worked as a research assistant to Professor Tonio Andrade, which deepened her interest in historical scholarship.  Listen to her discuss her love of history and plans for a career as an historian.