Category / Awards

by emoryhistorydept

Sanders Chronicles the Impacts of “Segregation Scholarships”

Dr. Crystal R. Sanders, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently published A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs with UNC Press. The book chronicles the little-known history of “segregation scholarships,” a pre–Brown v. Board of Education practice wherein southern states paid to send Black students out of state for graduate education instead of creating separate but equal graduate programs at tax-supported Black colleges or by admitting Black students to historically white institutions. A finalist for the 2025 Association for the Study of African American Life and History Book Prize, A Forgotten Migration was also the focus of a recent piece in Forbes. Read an excerpt from that piece, in which Sanders explains the genesis of the project, along with the full article: “A History Of ‘Segregation Scholarships’ And The Impact On HBCUs.”

“Growing up in rural North Carolina, I noticed that many of the retired Black public school teachers in my church had master’s degrees from NYU and Columbia University’s Teachers College. Quick math let me know that they had earned these degrees in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I asked my father why these women had chosen to go so far away for graduate school and he answered my question with a question: ‘Did they really have a choice?’” Sanders elaborated, “My dad’s comments stayed with me and I began exploring the credentials of Black public school teachers in the decades before desegregation and realized that Black teachers all over the South seemed to have these degrees from northeastern and midwest institutions.”

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Strocchia Receives SIHS Senior Scholar Citation

Dr. Sharon T. Strocchia, Professor of History, has been selected as the recipient of this year’s Society for Italian Historical Studies Senior Scholar Citation. The award recognizes Strocchia’s “profound contributions to the study of Italian history – as a researcher, teacher, and mentor – and the esteem of her peers, colleagues, and students in the field.” Strocchia has authored or edited multiple books, including Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (Harvard UP, 2019), which won prizes from the Society for Italian Historical Studies, the Renaissance Society of America, and the History of Science Society. 

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Becca de Los Santos Wins AHA Prize for Undergraduate Research

First-year graduate student Becca De Los Santos has been awarded the American Historical Association’s Raymond J. Cunningham Prize, given annually for the best article published in a journal and written by an undergraduate student. She published the prize-winning article, “Inversion of the Top-Down Operation: Enslaved Voices and French Abolitionism in 1840s Senegal,” in the Spring 2024 edition of Herodotus while in her senior year at Stanford University. Her related undergraduate honors work also received accolades. Titled “‘Poor Souls’ and ‘Dangerous Vagabonds’: The Enslaved Pursuit of Liberation in Post-Abolition Senegal, 1848-1865,” her thesis received the Josephine Baker Undergraduate Honors Thesis Prize and the Robert M. Golden Medal for Excellence in the Humanities and Creative Arts at Stanford.

As a first-year doctoral student, Becca is interested in slavery, abolition, and emancipatory trajectories in the nineteenth-century French Empire. In particular, she seeks to examine how individuals negotiated their livelihoods after emancipation through laws and customs. Her geographic areas of interest include Senegal, Réunion, French Guiana, and Guadeloupe. Her faculty advisers are Mariana P. Candido, Adriana Chira, and Clifton Crais.

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‘Since Time Immemorial’ Wins AHA’s Katz Prize


Congratulations to Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, whose most recent book, Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico (Duke University Press, 2023), has won the prestigious Friedrich Katz Prize from the American Historical Association. The Katz Prize is given annually to the best book published in English focusing on Latin America. Since Time Immemorial, Yannakakis writes, “traces the invention, translation, and deployment of the legal category of Native custom, with particular attention to how Indigenous litigants and colonial authorities refashioned social and cultural norms related to marriage, crime, religion, land, labor, and self-governance in Native communities.” The book is available open access from Duke UP. Yannakakis is Department Chair and Professor of History. Read the book abstract below and learn more about the Katz Prize.

In Since Time Immemorial Yanna Yannakakis traces the invention of Native custom, a legal category that Indigenous litigants used in disputes over marriage, self-governance, land, and labor in colonial Mexico. She outlines how, in the hands of Native litigants, the European category of custom—social practice that through time takes on the normative power of law—acquired local meaning and changed over time. Yannakakis analyzes sources ranging from missionary and Inquisition records to Native pictorial histories, royal surveys, and Spanish and Native-language court and notarial documents. By encompassing historical actors who have been traditionally marginalized from legal histories and highlighting spaces outside the courts like Native communities, parishes, and missionary schools, she shows how imperial legal orders were not just imposed from above but also built on the ground through translation and implementation of legal concepts and procedures. Yannakakis argues that, ultimately, Indigenous claims to custom, which on the surface aimed to conserve the past, provided a means to contend with historical change and produce new rights for the future.

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Jill Rosenthal (PhD, ’14) Wins CUNY Award for Outstanding Research


Dr. Jill Rosenthal, a 2014 alumnus and now Associate Professor of African History at Hunter College, recently received the 2024 Wasser – Gross Award for Outstanding Research from the City University of New York. The award recognizes academically impressive assistant professors from all CUNY campuses. Awardees present their research as part of the Feliks Gross and Henry Wasser lecture series. Rosenthal’s research focuses on migration, identity, and international aid in the African Great Lakes region, with a focus on the legacy of colonial borders. Duke UP published her first book, From Migrants to Refugees: The Politics of Aid along the Tanzania-Rwanda Border, last year.


Rosenthal completed her graduate work under the advisement of Dr. Clifton Crais. Read more about Rosenthal’s exceptional research and teaching: “Hunter Professor Wins CUNY Award for Outstanding Research.”

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Marissa L. Nichols (PhD, ’23) and Arturo Luna Loranca (PhD, ’24) Receive Dissertation Awards


Two of the Emory History Department’s recent doctoral graduates, both from the department’s top-tier Latin American History program, have been awarded prizes for their dissertations. Dr. Marissa L. Nichols, whose dissertation is titled “Nurses, Indigenous Authorities, and Rural Health in Oaxaca, Mexico, 1934-1970,” received two prizes: the Teresa E. Christy Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing (AAHN) as well as honorable mention for the Richmond Brown Dissertation Prize from the Latin American & Caribbean Section (LACS) of the Southern Historical Association (SHA). Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, History Department Chair and Professor, advised Nichols’s dissertation. The award committee offered the following assessment of Nichols’s dissertation:

The study by Marissa Nichols is a layered and fascinating account of public health efforts in rural Mexico.  This dissertation is very readable and well documented and makes a serious contribution to the literature on development initiatives, especially in healthcare and education in indigenous communities in Mexico. It is original in that it asks new questions of the source data and centers nursing history in contexts other than the usual Eurocentric framework and many of the concepts can be applied globally.

Using the close reading of primary sources and ethnohistory along with a native linguist, Dr. Nichols develops a strong argument for new, rigorous review of how translation of documents impacts the conclusions drawn by researchers of cross-cultural concepts and constructs. The use of a wide variety of methods and approaches to uncover lesser-known aspects of the work of rural nurses, Dr. Nichols provides a scholarly ethnohistory that is a true pleasure to read.

Dr. Arturo Luna Loranca also received honorable mention for the Richmond Brown Dissertation Prize for his doctoral thesis, titled “The Dog Remains: Mexico City’s Canine Massacres During the Enlightenment, 1770-1821.” Associate Professor Dr. Javier Villa-Flores advised his dissertation.

Congratulations to you both!

by emoryhistorydept

Becky E. Herring Named Emory College Employee of the Year

On Thursday, August 15, 2024, at the College Staff Service Award Honoree Ceremony and New School Year Kickoff with speaker and host Emory College Dean Barbara Krauthamer, Becky E. Herring won the 2024 Emory College Employee of the Year Award. Seven letters of nomination were submitted for Becky, who serves as the History Department’s Senior Academic Department Administrator.

Herring with History Department faculty and staff and Dean Krauthamer after she won the award.

This college-wide award is designed to recognize one employee annually for outstanding contributions to Emory College. Any current college staff with 24 months of continuous service is eligible to be nominated for this award. The employee is selected based on job performance, interpersonal skills, and service to the Emory Community. Congratulations for this much deserved award, Becky!

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Billups Investigates Global White Supremacist Networks in South Africa

Earlier this year, Emory History Department PhD candidate William (Robert) Billups investigated connections between antisemitic networks in South Africa and civil rights opponents in the US South. Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies (TIJS) supported Billups’ research on this topic, which included three weeks at two South African archives, the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and the University of the Free State’s Archive for Contemporary Affairs. Records from those archives helped Billups to understand the links between some US civil rights opponents and far-right groups outside of the US.

In an excellent reflection on the research published by the TIJS, Billups writes:

“As KKK members increasingly perpetrated violence in the civil rights South, some white South Africans sought to join US-based KKK organizations. To study South African Klan members, I spent two weeks in the Archive for Contemporary Affairs in Bloemfontein. Following guidance from the South African historian Milton Shain and the archivist Lwazi Mestile, I focused on the papers of Ray Rudman, South Africa’s self-described Klan leader during the 1950s and 1960s. Rudman’s papers contained letters and recruitment materials about joining a Klan organization based in Waco, Texas.

I expected white South African Klan recruits to describe their opposition to the anti-apartheid movement, a liberation movement that in many ways paralleled the US civil rights movement, as their main motive for joining. Some did. But to my surprise, antisemitic beliefs that far-right South Africans shared with US-based Klan leaders seemed to them an equally important connection, if not a more important one. They described entering the Klan as joining US white supremacists in fighting the supposed international Jewish conspiracy that they falsely believed controlled world communism, the civil rights movement, and the anti-apartheid movement.”

Billups received his doctorate in May 2024. He completed his dissertation, “‘Reign of Terror’: Anti–Civil Rights Terrorism in the United States, 1954–1976,” under the advisement of Drs. Joseph Crespino and Allen Tullos. Billups was recognized for his stellar record of research with the Laney Graduate School’s Outstanding Scholarly Research Award.

by emoryhistorydept

Celebrating Senior Prize Recipients

The Undergraduate Committee is pleased to announce the recipients of the History Department’s Undergraduate Senior Prizes for 2023-2024. They are:

George P. Cuttino Prize for the best record in European History: Harrison Helms

James Z. Rabun Prize for the best record in American History: Joe Beare

The African, Asian, and Latin American History Prize for the best record in African, Asian, and Latin American History: Orion Jones and Yingyi Tan

Matthew A. Carter Citizen-Scholar Award: Anhhuy Do

These awards were presented at our in-person Senior Celebration on Wednesday, May 1, 2pm – 3:30pm, in the Emory Student Center. Congratulations to all!

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Olivia Cocking Wins Award from the Society for French Historical Studies

Graduate student Olivia Cocking has won a Farrar Memorial Award from the Society for French Historical Studies to continue her dissertation research in France. Her project, “Droits assurés, droits bafoués: Race, Nationality, and the Right to Living Well in France After Empire,” has involved research in Paris, Lille, and Marseilles thus far. Cocking has presented her work at the French Colonial Historical Society Conference (Martinique) and the European Association for Urban History Conference (Antwerp, Belgium). Cocking also holds a 3-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship. Her dissertation committee is co-chaired by Professors Tehila Sasson and Judith Miller and includes Prof. Mariana Candido.