Category / Alumni

by abritt

Dr. Claudia Kreklau (Ph.D., ’18) Publishes Article on Bismarck and Gender in ‘German History’

Emory History alum Dr. Claudia Kreklau published an article in the April issue of the journal German History. Titled “The Gender Anxiety of Otto von Bismarck, 1866–1898,” the piece is Kreklau’s fourth published article. Kreklau completed under Ph.D. in 2018 under the advisement of Dr. Brian Vick. She is Associate Lecturer at the University of St. Andrews. Read the abstract of the article below along with the full piece here.

“Building on critical re-examinations of the ‘Bismarck myth’ and scholarship on the fin de siècle crisis of identity in Europe, this article examines key vignettes in the political career of Otto von Bismarck during Prussia’s era of expansion and consolidation, c.1866–1898, through the lens of gender. It finds the legendary ‘Iron Chancellor’ experienced extreme gender-anxiety to the point of social dysphoria until the 1870s. Assigned feminine roles and lacking political decision-making power, Bismarck resorted to tantrums, tears, threats of self-harm and suicide, suffered mental breakdowns and enacted the kinds of ‘feminine’ intrigue of which he accused Europe’s royal women throughout his life. To stabilize their own identity in the early 1870s, he and his contemporaries weaponized misogyny to deflect accusations of femininity away from themselves and onto women at court. Bismarck claimed to have led negotiations in a masculine manner in the era of Europe’s colonial cabinet diplomacy. After his death, contemporaries studied the shape and measurements of Bismarck’s head to find an explanation for his alleged genius and marketed the statesman as an example of potent masculinity. Early hagiographic instrumentalizations of Bismarck should be read as part of a wider attempt to legitimize forms of white masculine rule and justify limited political participation in this period.”

by abritt

Ph.D. Graduate Camille Goldmon Featured by Emory News

Dr. Camille Goldmon graduated with her Ph.D. in history in the spring of 2022. The Emory News Center celebrated Goldmon’s graduate career with a feature story titled “An unexpected knack for mentoring forges connections on campus and beyond.” The piece spans from Goldmon’s initial decision to apply to Laney Graduate School through her stellar impact at Emory and post-graduate plans: a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton, followed by a tenure-track position at the University of Oregon. Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African-American Studies, supervised Goldmon’s dissertation, “On the Right Side of Radicalism: African American Farmers, Tuskegee Institute, and Agrarian Radicalism in the Alabama Black Belt, 1881–1940.” Read the full Emory News Center piece here along with an excerpt quoting Anderson below.

“Camille Goldmon is, like a riff on the Maya Angelou poem, Phenom, Phenom, Phenomenal Scholar,” says Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and chair of African American Studies and Goldmon’s advisor. “Her research is innovative and forces us to rethink radicalism. Her teaching is engaging, powerful and transformative. Her mentoring of students in the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program is outstanding. Her work on uncovering Atlanta’s past for the Just Futures Mellon grant is mind-blowing and narrative disrupting.”

“If this sounds like a string of superlatives, it’s simply because that’s Camille,” Anderson adds. “She is superlative.”

by abritt

Hannah Abrahamson Hired at College of the Holy Cross

Hannah Abrahamson, a doctoral candidate graduating in the summer of 2022, has been hired as Assistant Professor of Early Modern Latin American History at the College of the Holy Cross. Abrahamson completed her dissertation, titled “Women of the Encomienda: Households and Dependents in Sixteenth-Century Yucatan, Mexico,” under the advisement of Drs. Yanna Yannakakis, Javier Villa-Flores, and Tonio Andrade. She looks forward to teaching courses on gender and sexuality and Indigenous history at the Worcester, MA, liberal arts college in the upcoming academic year.

by abritt

Danielle Lee Wiggins (PhD ’18) Wins ACLS Fellowship

Dr. Danielle Lee Wiggins, Assistant Professor at the California Institute of Technology and a 2018 graduate of the PhD program, has won a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Wiggins is one of sixty scholars nationwide selected for the prestigious ACLS Fellowship, which recognizes outstanding scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. The fellowship will support Wiggins’s work on her current manuscript project, titled “The Politics of Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Politics.” Jimmy Carter Professor of History Dr. Joseph Crespino served as Wiggins’s advisor at Emory. Read the abstract of Wiggins’s project below.

“This project examines how black political leaders in Atlanta in the 1970s and 1980s managed three challenges associated with the postindustrial urban crisis—crime, family instability, and joblessness— with what this project calls the ‘politics of black excellence.’ This approach entailed the expansion of existing practices of racial uplift into the realm of policy. Adherents sought to discipline black people with policies purported to fortify black communities against the internal threat of ‘black-on-black’ crime, restore the black nuclear family, and cultivate diligent black workers. This study argues that in proposing reform of the self, the family, and black communities as solutions to structural crises, Atlanta’s black political class innovated new modes of black politics and Democratic governance.“

by abritt

Andrew G. Britt (PhD ’18) Serves as Dramaturg for UNCSA Play about Brazilian Waste Pickers

Dr. Andrew G. Britt, Assistant Professor at the UNC School of the Arts and a 2018 alumnus of the graduate program, served as a dramaturg over the 2021-’22 academic year for a UNCSA play focused on Brazilian waste pickers (catadores). Titled Mother Tongue, the production was conceived of and directed by Marina Zurita, a fourth-year student in UNCSA’s top-ranked drama program. That play was a devised piece, meaning that Zurita and the cast collectively produced the play’s central narrative together. Interviews that Zurita conducted with catadores in her native city of São Paulo served as the raw material for the devising process. Britt provided support to Zurita throughout the research process and to the director and cast while they devised the narrative, including by offering short courses on Brazilian history and culture and organizing virtual conversations with other Brazilian scholars. Check out the dramaturg’s note that Britt composed below for the show’s program and read more about Mother Tongue here: “‘Mother Tongue’ is first devised theater production at UNCSA by a student.”

Every day throughout Brazil, hundreds of thousands of pickers, or catadores in Portuguese, comb through the solid materials either discarded by the country’s more than 210 million residents or exported to Brazil from other nations. Pickers collect paper, plastic, glass, aluminum and other metals, frequently amid
hazardous environmental conditions. They transport these materials to processing facilities, sort and organize them and resell them to companies who utilize them to produce new goods.

Without the informal labor of this fleet of green-collar workers, millions of tons of recyclable materials would end up in landfills. Though not formally employed by Brazilian public institutions like municipal governments, pickers perform an essential public service. Some estimates hold that pickers contribute to the processing of 90% of Brazil’s recycled materials. Other countries throughout the world, especially those in the Global South, similarly depend on pickers for recycling streams and waste management. Even New York City has its own cadre of between 8,000-10,000 pickers, known locally as canners, who scour
city streets for reusable material.

While pickers perform essential labor worldwide, their work has long been unrecognized by government officials and stigmatized by society at large. This dynamic has begun to shift in recent years, however. Over the last three decades, coalitions of pickers in countries like Brazil and Colombia have led effective movements for greater rights and recognition. Brazilian federal law now grants pickers some protections and benefits as laborers, and Brazilian cities are now officially incentivized to coordinate with pickers in their waste management programs. The inclusion of pickers in state-coordinated recycling streams in Brazil has influenced public policy in other countries. The grassroots movement that brought about these changes has deep roots in the city of São Paulo at a local picker-led recycling cooperative where materials are sorted and sold. Some of the stories in “Mother Tongue” were inspired by the workers at this cooperative.

Even as the labor of pickers has become more recognized, the lives of pickers themselves remains shrouded in stigma and prejudice. With “Mother Tongue,” we invite audiences to cross these barriers of misunderstanding and connect with the inner and outer lives of these essential workers.

by abritt

Dr. Julia López Fuentes (PhD, ’20) Publishes Article in ‘Journal of Modern History’

Alumnus Dr. Julia López Fuentes has published an article in the Journal of Modern History, vol 94 Nr. 1 (March 2022), titled “‘A Forgetting for Everyone, by Everyone’? Spain’s Memory Laws and the Rise of the European Community of Memory, 1977–2007.” López Fuentes completed her PhD in 2020 under the advisement of Drs. Walter L. Adamson and Astrid M. Eckert and with a dissertation titled “Thinking Europe, Thinking Democracy: The Struggle for European Democracy in Spain, 1949-1986.” Read the Journal of Modern History article abstract below and find the full piece (limited access) here.

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.

by abritt

Tom Chaffin (PhD, ’95) Publishes ‘Odyssey: Young Charles Darwin, The Beagle, and The Voyage that Changed the World’

Tom Chaffin, a 1995 graduate of the doctoral program, has just published Odyssey: Young Charles Darwin, The Beagle, and The Voyage that Changed the World. Chaffin’s eighth book, Odyssey offers a glimpse into the often overlooked aspects of Charles Darwin’s five-year travels aboard the HMS Beagle and on land from the Americas to South Africa and Australia. An excerpt of the book was recently printed in Lapham’s Quarterly under the title, “A Disgrace to His Family: Meet Charles Darwin, somewhat aimless student and excellent beetle hunter.” Read a description of the book below and find out more information here.

Charles Darwin—alongside Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein—ranks among the world’s most famous scientists. In popular imagination, he peers at us from behind a bushy white Old Testament beard. This image of Darwin the Sage, however, crowds out the vital younger man whose curiosities, risk-taking, and travels aboard HMS Beagle would shape his later theories and served as the foundation of his scientific breakthroughs.

Though storied, the Beagle‘s voyage is frequently misunderstood, its mission and geographical breadth unacknowledged. The voyage’s activities associated with South America—particularly its stop in the Galapagos archipelago, off Ecuador’s coast—eclipse the fact that the Beagle, sailing in Atlantic, Pacific and Indian ocean waters, also circumnavigated the globe.

Mere happenstance placed Darwin aboard the Beagle—an invitation to sail as a conversation companion on natural-history topics for the ship’s depression-prone captain. Darwin was only twenty-two years old, an unproven, unknown, aspiring geologist when the ship embarked on what stretched into its five-year voyage. Moreover, conducting marine surveys of distance ports and coasts, the Beagle‘s purposes were only inadvertently scientific. And with no formal shipboard duties or rank, Darwin, after arranging to meet the Beagle at another port, often left the ship to conduct overland excursions.

Those outings, lasting weeks, even months, took him across mountains, pampas, rainforests, and deserts. An expert horseman and marksman, he won the admiration of gauchos he encountered along the way. Yet another rarely acknowledged aspect of Darwin’s Beagle travels, he also visited, often lingered in, cities—including Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Valparaiso, Santiago, Lima, Sydney, and Cape Town; and left colorful, often sharply opinionated, descriptions of them and his interactions with their residents. In the end, Darwin spent three-fifths of his five-year “voyage” on land—three years and three months on terra firma versus a total 533 days on water.

Acclaimed historian Tom Chaffin reveals young Darwin in all his complexities—the brashness that came from his privileged background, the Faustian bargain he made with Argentina’s notorious caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas, his abhorrence of slavery, and his ambition to carve himself a place amongst his era’s celebrated travelers and intellectual giants. Drawing on a rich array of sources— in a telling of an epic story that surpasses in breadth and intimacy the naturalist’s own Voyage of the Beagle—Chaffin brings Darwin’s odyssey to vivid life.

by abritt

SlaveVoyages Featured, Eltis Quoted in ‘NYT’ Article

The digital memorial and database project SlaveVoyages, spearheaded by Emeritus Professor David Eltis and maintained by numerous Emory faculty and alumni, was recently featured in an article in The New York Times. The piece, “We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was,” provides an overview of the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans as well as the history of SlaveVoyages itself. Originating in the 1960s, the database was recently expanded with a new section titled “Oceans of Kinfolk” that includes information on trafficking within North America in the first half of the nineteenth century. The New York Times columnist, Jamelle Bouie, situates this expansion in the context of a broader reflection about how data on slave trafficking can provide access to or, alternatively, obscure the lived experiences of the enslaved. The Steering Committee of SlaveVoyages includes the following Emory History faculty and alumni: Allen E. Tullos (Professor, Emory History Department), Alex Borucki (PhD 11, Associate Professor, UC-Irvine), and Daniel B. Domingues da Silva (PhD 11, Associate Professor, Rice University). Read Bouie’s article here: “We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was.”

by abritt

‘Jewish Review of Books’ Reviews ‘Jews and Booze’ by Marni Davis (PhD ’06)

The Jewish Review of Books recently reviewed the 2012 book Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition (NYU Press), written by PhD alum Marni Davis. Currently Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University, Davis received her PhD in U.S. and Jewish history in 2006. Allan Arkush, the senior contributing editor of the Jewish Review of Books and professor of Judaic studies and history at Binghamton University, reviewed Davis’s book in honor of New Year’s Eve 2021. Read Arkush’s piece here: “Lechaim!“

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Emory Historians Celebrated in ‘Feast of Words’

Each year the Emory Center for Faculty Development and Excellence, Emory Libraries, and the Emory Barnes and Noble Bookstore host the “Feast of Words,” an event celebrating Emory faculty who have written or edited books in the prior year. This year’s edition, which took place via Zoom, featured multiple works published by History Department faculty, associated faculty, and an alumnus between September 2020 and August 2021. Find a list of those faculty below, along with their publications, and watch the full virtual celebration here.

Anderson, Carol (African American Studies). The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. Bloomsbury.

Andrade, Antonio (History). The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China. Princeton UP.

Dudziak, Mary (Law) and Mark Philip Bradley, eds. Making the Forever War: Marilyn Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism. U of Massachusetts P.

Guidotti-Hernandez, Nicole (English). Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora. Duke UP.

Lal, Ruby (Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies). Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan. Penguin Random House, India.

Pardo, Rafael (Law), Paul Barron, and Mark Wessman. Secured Transactions: Problems and Materials. West Academic.

Perry, Craig (Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies and Jewish Studies), David Eltis (History, emeritus), Stanley Engerman, and David Richardson, eds. The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500 – AD 1420. Cambridge UP.