Category / Alumni

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Alumni Update: Dr. Claudia Kreklau (PhD, ’18)

Dr. Claudia Kreklau is a 2018 graduate of the doctoral program and associate lecturer at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Kreklau offers an update of recent publications, presentations, and podcast contributions in the list below. Kreklau completed her dissertation, titled “‘Eat as the King Eats’: Making the Middle Class through Food, Foodways, and Food Discourses in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” under the advisement of Dr. Brian Vick.

Journal article:

“Neither Gendered nor a Room: The Kitchen in Central Europe and the Masculinization of Modernity, 1800-1900,” in Special Section: The Kitchen in History, Global Food History, T&F, 7:1, (January 2021 e-version, March Issue 2021 paper), 5-35. DOI: 10.1080/20549547.2020.1863744.

Keynote Papers and Plenary Contributions:

“Otto von Bismarck’s Devouring Masculinity: Identity Shortcomings and Culinary Compensation of a Political Titan, 1815-1898,” Keynote, Devouring Men: Food, Masculinity and Power, University of St Andrews, (4th September 2020). 

“Making Modern Eating. How the German Middling Shaped our Culinary Practices, 1780-1914,” Plenary Lunch Lightning Round Presentation “Food for Thought,” German Studies Association (GSA) 43rd Annual Conference, Portland, USA (3-6th Oct. 2019).

Podcasts

“‎Episode1: Making Cows Brains your Oyster.” Season 1. Looking the Part. 90 Second Narratives on Apple Podcasts. Accessed March 31, 2020. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/making-cow-brains-your-oyster/id1503904443?i=1000470033190

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Dr. Abigail Meert (PhD, ’19) Wins NEH Fellowship

Congratulations to Dr. Abigail Meert, a 2019 PhD graduate in African history, on winning a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Meert received a summer stipend for her project “Suffering, Struggle, and the Politics of Legitimacy in Uganda, 1958–1996.” She will conduct archival research in Uganda and the United Kingdom along with semi-structured follow-up interviews with previous informants. The expected outcome of the research is an academic article as part of her book project on the Ugandan Civil War from 1981–1986. Meert is Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M International University.

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Lisa Greenwald (PhD ’96) Featured on Fox News NY and NBC News NY

Fox and NBC news outlets in New York City recently featured the community building work of Dr. Lisa Greenwald, a 1996 graduate of the Emory History PhD program. Greenwald has been a driving force behind the reanimation of her block association in New York City’s Upper West Side, which has organized multiple charitable projects relating to COVID-19. Greenwald herself was named “New Yorker of the Week” earlier this year in recognition of her cooking dinner every Wednesday night for women and children at a local shelter. Greenwald teaches at Stuyvesant High School and published Daughters of 1968: Redefining French Feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement with the University of Nebraska Press in 2019. Watch the news stories featuring Greenwald and the block association’s work: “Pandemic Brings NYC Neighborhood Closer Together” and “West 111th Street Block Association.”

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Slave Voyages Launches Consortium

Slave Voyages, a preeminent resource for the study of slavery and a digital memorial, recently launched a cooperative consortium with six other institutions to ensure its sustainability. The consortium includes Emory, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture at William & Mary, Rice University, and three campuses at the University of California that will assume a joint membership: UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine and UC Berkeley. Slave Voyages contains the records of tens of thousands of trans-Atlantic and inter-American slaving voyages, and users can submit new records as they are encountered.

The database grew out of the archival research of Dr. David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor Emeritus in the Emory History Department. Dr. Allen E. Tullos, Professor of History and Director of the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, has worked on an extensive update and expansion of the project since 2018. He serves on the project’s steering committee, along with Emory History Department graduate alumni Dr. Alex Borucki (University of California, Irvine) and Dr. Daniel B. Domingues da Silva (Rice University). Read more about launch of the consortium through a quote from Eltis below along with articles in the Atlanta Journal Constitution and from the Emory News Center.

“‘The launch of the SlaveVoyages.org consortium is an innovation not just for scholars of slavery, but for all soft money digital humanities projects,’ says David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor Emeritus of History and co-director of the SlaveVoyages project. ‘At long last, this consortium opens up a route to sustainability.‘

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Yaza Sarieh (‘18Ox, ‘20C) Wins 2020-21 Henry Luce Foundation Fellowship

Congratulations to recently graduated History major Yaza Sarieh (‘18Ox ‘20C) on receiving the Henry Luce Foundation Fellowship for 2021-2022. Yaza was also the recipient of the History Department’s Matthew A. Carter Award, given annually to a graduating student who exemplifies high academic achievement and good works in the community. Sarieh is one of only a dozen Emory students to win this prestigious fellowship in the university’s history. Read the Luce Foundation’s profile of Sarieh below, along with the same from the Emory News Center: “Two recent Emory graduates selected for prestigious Luce Scholars Program.” Also, learn about the other Luce fellowship winners from this past year here.

“Yazmina Sarieh graduated from Emory University in May 2020 with a Bachelor’s degree in History and Arabic. Born and raised in a small immigrant community outside of Nashville, Tennessee, Yazmina has always had a passion for service, social justice and diversity. At Emory, she co-directed Behind the Glass, an organization connecting students with undocumented detainees who were being held in a nearby detention center. She led initiatives at Georgia Organics, a food justice organization, managing a project that mapped demographics, health disparities and nutritional assets in order to alleviate food insecurity among schoolchildren. She has volunteered with the International Rescue Committee to support the integration of newly arrived refugees from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Democratic Republic of Congo and Honduras. While interning at the Carter Center, she worked on large-scale conflict resolution with international actors regarding the Syrian Civil War, specifically advocating for the rights of internally displaced populations. As a Gilman Scholar at al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco and the Sultan Qaboos University in Manah, Oman, Yazmina connected with people around the globe, engaging in cross cultural dialogue and integrating into diverse communities. She was named a Phi Beta Kappa scholar upon graduation, and received the Matthew A. Carter Citizens Award from the Emory History Department, given to one student who best exemplifies academic achievement and good works in the community. Yazmina is motivated to work in migrant rights and advocacy, hoping to create more efficient policy, programming and infrastructure that will enhance economic growth, social inclusion and political stability among marginalized communities. During her free time, Yazmina loves to preserve her Palestinian heritage through embroidery, reading ethnographies and caring for her plants.“

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Abigail Meert (PhD, ’19) Publishes Article in the ‘International Journal of African Historical Studies’

Dr. Abilgail Meert (PhD, ’19) recently published an article in the International Journal of African Historical Studies. Titled “Suffering, Consent, and Coercion in Uganda: The Luwero War, 1981-1986,” the piece offers a fresh interpretation of popular support for a much-celebrated guerilla movement led by the The Ugandan National Resistance Army (NRA) and National Resistance Movement (NRM). Meert is Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M International University. She completed her doctoral work under the advisement of Clifton Crais and with a dissertation titled “Suffering, Struggle, and the Politics of Legitimacy in Uganda, 1962-1996.” Read the abstract of Meert’s article below.

The Ugandan National Resistance Army (NRA) and its political wing, the National Resistance Movement (NRM), are lauded in Africanist scholarship for being one the first guerrilla movements to overthrow an independent state in post-colonial African history. Scholars have largely attributed the NRA/M’s unprecedented success to its innovative strategies of governance and political education during the war, crediting these initiatives with legitimizing the NRA/M and encouraging civilians’ voluntary support within the war effort. This article contends that the NRA/M’s wartime reforms had only minimal impact on civilian decisions to participate in the 1981-1986 Luwero War. Instead, it argues that popular fear of the incumbent state motivated civilians to join the rebel movement. In recognizing the constraints within which civilians consented to NRA/M leadership, this article offers insight into broader questions of authority, legitimacy, and mobilization in African politics. Such reflection may also help contextualize the claims that African political leaders make toward power and explain variations in the resonance of those claims for African audiences over time.

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Lisa Greenwald (PhD, ’96) Featured as ‘New Yorker of the Week’

PhD alumna Lisa Greenwald was recently featured as the “New Yorker of the Week” by Spectrum News’ NY1 outlet. The story focuses on how Greenwald has cooked dinner each Wednesday night throughout the pandemic for 30 women and children at a shelter across from her Morningside Heights home. Greenwald, who graduated from the Emory PhD program in 1996 and teaches at Stuyvesant High School, published Daughters of 1968: Redefining French Feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement with the University of Nebraska Press in 2019. Read the feature about her service to her neighbors here: “New Yorker of the Week: Lisa Greenwald.”

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‘WSJ’ Reviews PhD Alumnus Robert Elder’s ‘Calhoun: American Heretic’ (Basic Books, 2021)

Basic Books will publish the second monograph from Dr. Robert Elder, a 2011 graduate of the Emory History doctoral program, this month. Titled Calhoun: American Heretic, the book is a cultural and intellectual biography of the father of Southern secession. In a recent review The Wall Street Journal’s Jonathan Horn described the book as a “serious analysis” that “traces how Calhoun’s thinking continues to influence American society today and shows how academic scholarship has moved ever closer to accepting Calhoun’s once shocking ideas about the role of slavery in American history.” Now Assistant Professor at Baylor University, Elder completed his graduate work at Emory under the advisement of S C Dobbs Professor Emeritus Professor James L. Roark. Read more about Calhoun: American Heretic at Basic Books and in the WSJ review: “‘Calhoun’ Review: The Nullifier and His Legacy.”

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Michael Camp (PhD, ’17) Excavates John Lewis’s Forgotten Fight for the Mariel Cubans in Atlanta

Michael Camp (PhD, ’17), assistant professor and political papers archivist at the University of West Georgia, recently published a blog post for Atlanta Studies. Camp’s piece, “John Lewis’s Forgotten Fight: The Mariel Cubans in Atlanta,” discusses Lewis’s support for Cuban migrants in legal limbo while imprisoned in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in the late 1980s. Read an excerpt below along with the full piece.

However, one of the less remembered episodes of his career, the 1987 Mariel Cuban uprising in Atlanta’s federal penitentiary, deserves further consideration in our current moment, especially given Atlanta’s burgeoning status as a destination for immigrants desiring opportunity and a new home. It also deserves to be told as an important story in Lewis’s own career. After the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, many its leaders continued to advocate not only for the rights of African Americans but also those of other traditionally marginalized groups, such as immigrants. For his part, Lewis urged compassion for the Cubans imprisoned in Atlanta, extending the broad legacies of the civil rights movement into a new era.

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Cheng-Heng Lu (PhD, ’20) Named Guest Professor in Department of History at KU Leuven

Dr. Cheng-Heng Lu, has been named a guest professor in the Department of History at KU Leuven. Lu completed his PhD in the fall of 2020 under the advisement of Dr. Tonio Andrade and with a dissertation titled, “The Art of being an Imperial Broker: The Qing Conquest of Taiwan and Maritime Society (1624-1788).” Lu was also a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies from 2020-2021.