Category / Alumni

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History Department Announces 2021-’22 Graduate Award Winners

Congratulations to the graduate students who won 2021-’22 awards in the History Department. These awards were formally announced at the fall Department of History party on Friday, October 29. See the names of the winners and details below.

The Ross H. and May B. McLean Prize, awarded annually to the first-year student/s in history who achieved the most distinguished record for the previous year.

The Francis S. Benjamin Prize, awarded for the best paper written by a graduate student during their first two years in the Emory History PhD program.

The Blair Rogers Major and James Russell Major Dissertation Award, given annually to the most promising student writing a dissertation in the history of Europe and of European expansion (including the British Isles), from classical antiquity to the present. 

*As one-time special exception, due to COVID-19 and the inability to award it in 2020-21, two awards were granted in 2021-22.

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Dr. Navyug Gill (PhD, ’14) Publishes Article in ‘Past & Present’

PhD alum Dr. Navyug Gill has published an article in the journal Past & Present. Gill completed his dissertation, “Labours of Division: Peasant Castes and the Politics of Agrarian Hierarchy in Colonial Panjab,” in 2014 under the advisement of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor Gyanendra Pandey. Gill is now Assistant Professor in the Department of History at William Paterson University. Read the abstract of the Past & Present article below along with the full piece here: “Accumulation by Attachment: Colonial Benevolence and the Rule of Capital in Nineteenth-Century Panjab.”

A persistent theme in the emergence of capitalism is the displacement of peasants from the countryside into industrializing cities, with regions not undergoing such a transition usually deemed semi-feudal, proto-capitalist or pre-modern. Instead of separations, however, Panjab was the site of an altogether different dynamic of accumulation based on forging a series of novel attachments. This article begins by tracing the East India Company’s conquest in 1849, and the development of an ostensibly benevolent land revenue settlement based on surveying, measuring and calculating agrarian potential. Next, it examines how this process generated a set of natural and human contingencies so that certain castes were fixed to parcels of land, and expected to pay increasing rates while cultivating global commodities and conducting exchanges in cash. To make sense of this difference, it then contrasts the archive of settlement work with Karl Marx’s narrative of primitive accumulation, to explicate the conditions and limitations of its universality. Together this demonstrates how caste-based peasant agriculture in Panjab was a new phenomenon implicated in a modern yet distinctive rule of capital. In a broader sense, this offers possibilities to rethink the politics of comparative analysis as well as the alterity of capitalist transitions across the colonial world.

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Dr. Aditya Pratap Deo (PhD, ’13) Publishes ‘Kings, Spirits and Memory in Central India’

Congratulations to Dr. Aditya Pratap Deo on the publication of his book Kings, Spirits and Memory in Central India: Enchanting the State (Routledge, 2022). Deo, who teaches History at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, completed his dissertation in 2013 under the advisement of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor Gyanendra Pandey. Read Routledge’s summary of Kings, Spirits and Memory below.

“Part anthropological history and part memoir, this book is a unique study of the polity of the colonial-princely state of Kanker in central India. The author, a scion of the erstwhile ruling family of Kanker, delves into the oral accounts given in the ancestral deity practices of the mixed tribe-caste communities of the region to highlight popular narratives of its historical polity. As he struggles with his own dilemmas as ethnographer-king, what comes into view is a polity where the princely state is drawn out amidst a terrain of gods and spirits as much as that of law courts and magistrates, and political power is divided, contested and shared between the raja/state and the people. This study constitutes not only an intervention in the larger debate on the relationship between state formations and tribal peoples, but also on the very nature of history as a knowledge practice, especially the understandings of power, authority and sovereignty in it.

“Combining intensive ethnography, complementary archival work and crucial theoretical questions engaging social scientists worldwide, the author charts an unusual explanatory path that can allow us to obtain a meaningful understanding of societies/peoples that have historically been marginalized and seen as different. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of history, anthropology, politics, religion, tribal society and Modern South Asia.“

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Sean Andrew Wempe (PhD, 2015) Discusses ‘Revenants of the German Empire’ on New Books Network

Dr. Sean Andrew Wempe, A 2015 PhD alumnus and Assistant Professor of Modern European History at California State University–Bakersfield, was recently interviewed for New Books Network. Wempe discusses his 2019 book Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations (Oxford UP) with Jack Guenther, a doctoral candidate in history at Princeton University. Find the link to the interview here.

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Alumni Update: Jeffrey S. Reznick (PhD, 1999)

Jeffrey S. Reznick (PhD 1999), chief of the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health (NIH), has written the first study of Rudolf H. Sauter (1895–1977), the German-born artist, poet, cultural observer and nephew of the famed novelist John Galsworthy. To be published by Anthem Press in January 2022, War and Peace in the Worlds of Rudolf H. Sauter: A Cultural History of a Creative Life reveals its subject as a creative figure in his own right who produced an intriguing body of artistic and literary work spanning from World War I through the Cold War. Additionally, connected to his leadership of the NLM History of Medicine Division, Reznick recently co-authored “History matters: in the past, present & future of the NLM” in the Journal of the Medical Library Association. The article explains how—since the release of the 2015 report of the NIH’s Director’s advisory committee on the future of the National Library of Medicine—history continues to matter at NLM with its History of Medicine Division achieving many collaborative contributions toward the advancement of the library in the 21st century and for the benefit of historical research today and tomorrow.

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Dr. Sean T. Byrnes (PhD, ’14) Publishes ‘Disunited Nations’ with LSU Press

Congratulations to Dr. Sean T. Byrnes, a 2014 graduate of the PhD program in history, on the publication of his first book, Disunited Nations: US Foreign Policy, Anti-Americanism, and the Rise of the New Right. Louisiana State University published the monograph. Byrnes is an instructor of history at Western Governor’s University. Read the description of the book below and find out more here.

Disunited Nations explores American reactions to hostile world opinion, as voiced in the United Nations by representatives of the Global South from 1970 to 1984. Sean T. Byrnes suggests this challenge had a significant impact on US policy and politics, shaping the rise of the New Right and neoliberal visions of the world economy. Integrating developments in American political and diplomatic history with the international history of decolonization and the “Third World,” Disunited Nations adds to our understanding of major transitions in foreign policy as the US moved away from the expansive internationalist global commitments of the immediate postwar era toward a more nationalist and neoliberal understanding of international affairs.

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Fulbright Awards Support Research by Brunner and Steinman

Two History Department students have received research awards through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. PhD candidate Georgia Brunner will study and research gender, labor, and identity between 1918-1985 in the building of Rwanda. Undergraduate alum Jesse Steinman (21C), a history and German studies double major, was selected for the Fulbright Community-Based Combined Award in History for a project developing an interreligious educational program about Graz, Austria’s Jewish history. Read the full list of Emory students selected for Fulbright awards this season here.

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Michael Camp (PhD, ’17) Publishes Piece in ‘Salon’

Dr. Michael Camp, a 2017 graduate of the doctoral program, recently published an article in Salon. The piece, “Sorry, Republicans: Joe Biden isn’t Jimmy Carter — and these aren’t the 1970s,” interrogates the comparisons that political opponents of Joe Biden have made between the current U.S. president and ex-president Jimmy Carter. Camp is the author of Unnatural Resources: Energy and Environmental Politics in Appalachia after the 1973 Oil Embargo (University of Pittsburg Press, 2019). Read an excerpt of the Salon piece below along with the full article.

“Perhaps it’s understandable that the Trumps might want to link Biden to Carter, who left office in 1981 in shame, having been thoroughly defeated in his bid for re-election by Ronald Reagan. But the comparison likely won’t stand for long, because our current situation bears little resemblance to the political morass of the late 1970s that doomed Carter’s quest for a second term in office.”

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Alumni Update: Kate McGrath (PhD, ’07)

Dr. Kate McGrath, a 2007 graduate of the doctoral program, was recently promoted to Associate Dean of the Carol A. Ammon College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Central Connecticut State University. McGrath completed her degree in Medieval history with a dissertation titled “Medieval Anger: Rage and Outrage in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman and Northern French Historical Narratives.” Her dissertation research has informed multiple publications since, including the book chapter “The ‘Zeal of God’:  The Representation of Anger in the Latin Crusade Accounts of the 1096 Rhineland Massacres,” published in the edited collection Slay Them Not: Jews in Medieval Christendom (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Read more about McGrath’s work here.

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Alumni Update: Ellen G. Rafshoon (’01 PhD)

The History Department recently received an alumni update from Dr. Ellen G. Rafshoon, a 2001 graduate of the doctoral program. This year Dr. Rafshoon was promoted to Professor at Georgia Gwinnett College. In addition, she won the school’s outstanding faculty for student engagement award, a recognition that includes the honor of leading the student processional at GGC’s graduation ceremony. Rafshoon’s most recent publication is “Pave it Blue: Georgia Women and Politics in the Trump Era,” in Stacie Taranto and Leandra Zarnow, Suffrage at 100: Women in American Politics Since 1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020). The essay is based on interviews that she conducted with neophyte activists and candidates who contributed to the Blue Wave in Georgia.