Dr. Debjani Bhattacharyya‘s (PhD, ’14) Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge UP, 2018) has recently been made available open access by Cambridge University Press. The monograph, which was Bhattacharyya’s first, won the 2019 honorable mention for the best book in Urban History from the Urban History Association. Bhattacharyya is Associate Professor of History at Drexel University.
Category / Alumni
Emory News Center Features ‘Slave Voyages’ Digital Memorial
The Emory News Center recently featured the Slave Voyages project among initiatives at Emory making an impact. The article discusses the expansion and updating of the digital memorial over the last few years, including through a $300,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation in 2018. Initiated by Dr. David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor Emeritus, Emory faculty and alumni – including Alex Borucki (PhD, 2011), Daniel Domingues da Silva (PhD, 2011), Jane Hooper (PhD, 2010), Nafees Khan (PhD, 2013), and Allen Tullos (Professor and Co-Director of Emory Center for Digital Scholarship) – continue to constitute the core of the Voyages team. Read the full article here: “Documenting Slave Voyages.”
Michael Camp (PhD, ’17) Urges Biden Administration to Restore Endangered Species Act in ‘SLATE’ Article
Dr. Michael Camp (PhD, ’17), assistant professor and political papers archivist at the University of West Georgia, recently published an article for SLATE urging the incoming Biden administration to restore the Endangered Species Act. Camp is an environmental historian who published his first book, Unnatural Resources: Energy and Environmental Politics in Appalachia after the 1973 Oil Embargo, with the University of Pittsburg Press in 2019. Read an excerpt of the SLATE piece below along with the full article: “The Biden Administration Should Restore the Endangered Species Act to Full Strength.”
“As written, the ESA is a robust law with strong protections for endangered species, and doing away with the Trump changes would return the law’s impressive power to its previous state.“
Debjani Bhattacharyya (PhD, ’14) Publishes “Almanac of A Tide Country” for SSRC’s ‘Items’
Dr. Debjani Bhattacharyya, Associate Professor of History at Drexel University and a 2014 graduate of the PhD program, recently published an article in the Social Science Research Council’s digital publication Items. Published as a part of Items‘s “Ways of Water” series, the piece analyzes visual and historical representations of the tides of the Hooghly River in Kolkata. Bhattacharyya’s Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press, 2018) won the 2019 honorable mention award for the best book in urban history from the Urban History Association. Read the Items piece here: “Almanac of A Tide Country.”
Wiggins (18G) to Speak on “Legacies of Reconstruction” in “Lift Every Voice” Seminar Series
Dr. Danielle Wiggins, a 2018 graduate of the History PhD program, will join other panelists on November 10, 2020, to discuss the legacies of Reconstruction. Wiggins is Assistant Professor of History at Caltech. PhD candidate in History Camille Goldman will moderate the conversation. The event is a part of the Lift Every Voice seminar series, organized as a tribute to the late Dr. Pellom McDaniels, III. Find more details about the event, including registration, here: http://emorylib.info/lift-nov.
Dr. Claudia Kreklau (18G) a Featured Speaker at Emory 2020 Homecoming
Emory’s 2020 Homecoming virtual program featured 2018 History PhD alumna Claudia Kreklau, currently Associate Lecturer in the School of History at the University of St. Andrews. Kreklau spoke as a part of the program “A Taste of Emory from Around the World,” which was organized by Emory International Advancement and Constituent Engagement. Dr. Brian Vick advised Kreklau’s dissertation, titled “‘Eat as the King Eats’: Making the Middle Class through Food, Foodways, and Food Discourses in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Read more about the Homecoming program below and watch Dr. Kreklau’s presentation (Emory credentials required) here.
Take an exciting journey around the world to learn about the fascinating work of three international alumni working in the food and beverage industry. Discover how Jamie Koh 07B founded Singapore’s first stand-alone, micro-distillery for gin. Hear how Digant Kapoor 10Ox 12C is helping to expand sustainable farming in Dubai. And, learn the unique history of food from Claudia Kreklau 16G 18G.
Erica Bruchko (PhD, ’16) Helps to Archive Generations of Black Emory Students’ Calls for Change
In August of 2020 Emory University President Gregory L. Fenves asked Dean Yolanda Cooper, the University Librarian, to research and make available online calls for change from past and present generations of Black Emory students. Dr. Erica Bruchko, a 2016 alumna of the History Department’s graduate program and librarian for African American Studies and United States history at Emory Libraries, is working to advance this project. Bruchko has published three articles so far with collaborators Jina DuVernay, collection development archivist for African American collections, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, and Maureen McGavin, writer, Emory Libraries. Read about the work of generations of Black leaders and anti-racism at Emory in the first three articles to emerge from the initiative:
- “Black Students’ Activism at Emory: Past and Present,” August 17, 2020
- “Protests and Movements: From Anti-Lynching to Black Lives Matter,” September 22, 2020
- “Voting Rights: Vote Like Your Life Depends on It,” October 16, 2020
Ernest Freeberg (PhD, 1995) Publishes ‘A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement’
Dr. Ernest Freeberg (PhD, 1995), Professor and Department Head in the History Department at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, recently published A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement with Basic Books. Freeberg has authored three award-winning books. Read a summary of his newest below.
In Gilded Age America, people and animals lived cheek-by-jowl in streets that were dirty and dangerous to man and beast alike. As more people squeezed into crowded cities, their need for animals only grew—for energy and food, companionship and entertainment. At the same time, animals came to be associated with filth and disease and were often subject to cruel treatment and the worst abuses of human exploitation. The industrial city brought suffering, but it also inspired a compassion for animals that fueled a controversial anti-cruelty movement.
In A TRAITOR TO HIS SPECIES: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement (Basic Books; September 22, 2020), award-winning historian Ernest Freeberg tells the fascinating story of the eccentric aristocrat who launched a then-shocking campaign to bring rights to animals. In 1866, Henry Bergh founded New York’s American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), the nation’s first animal welfare organization, and successfully promoted an anticruelty law that paved the way for similar legislation across the country. Bergh and his corps of badge-wielding agents staged dramatic arrests and put abusers on trial, provoking public debate about our obligation to other species.
Sean Wempe (PhD, 2015) Publishes ‘Chronic Disparities: Public Health in Historical Perspective’ with Oxford UP
Dr. Sean Wempe, a 2015 alumnus of the History PhD program, has published his second book with Oxford University Press. The timely book – Chronic Disparities: Public Health in Historical Perspective – follows Wempe’s 2019 Revenants of the German Empire:
Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations. Wempe is Assistant Professor at California State University Bakersfield. Read more about Chronic Disparities below.
Chronic Disparities: Public Health in Historical Perspective begins with a controversial and pressing issue facing students today: how have public health initiatives challenged and/or reinforced societal inequalities of race, class, and gender? It explores the cultural, political, religious, demographic, and economic effects both government and private public-health practices have had on inequalities of race, class, and gender in an increasingly globalizing society, from the pre-Modern era to the present.
Chronic Disparities examines events and processes including the emergence of public health and sanitation in Europe; the coercive globalization of systems of health; colonial medicine and the selective application of “Western” medical policy; eugenics; responses to substance abuse; the AIDS/HIV pandemic; and many more. It includes a series introduction that explains this innovative approach to learning history and a conclusion that offers a model for applying the approach in seeking to understand other public health policies, events, and crises.
Emory Alumni Association Virtual Book Club Reads Lipstadt’s ‘Antisemitism: Here and Now’
The Emory Alumni Association is hosting a virtual book club that will read Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt’s most recent book, Antisemitism: Here and Now (Penguin Random House, 2019). The event, to be held on Thursday, September 03, 2020, will be moderated by Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Dean of the Emory College of Arts and Sciences Michael A. Elliott. Lipstadt is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department. Read a description of the book below, and learn more about the event here.
Over the last decade there has been a noticeable uptick in antisemitic rhetoric and incidents by left-wing groups targeting Jewish students and Jewish organizations on American college campuses. And the reemergence of the white nationalist movement in America, complete with Nazi slogans and imagery, has been reminiscent of the horrific fascist displays of the 1930s. Throughout Europe, Jews have been attacked by terrorists, and some have been murdered.
Where is all this hatred coming from? Is there any significant difference between left-wing and right-wing antisemitism? What role has the anti-Zionist movement played? And what can be done to combat the latest manifestations of an ancient hatred? In a series of letters to an imagined college student and imagined colleague, both of whom are perplexed by this resurgence, acclaimed historian Deborah Lipstadt gives us her own superbly reasoned, brilliantly argued, and certain to be controversial responses to these troubling questions.