Dr. Alison Collis Greene, Associate Professor of American religious history and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently recognized by the Candler School of Theology for her exceptional contributions inside and outside of the classroom. Greene received the Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Education, as well as the award for Outstanding Service to the Candler Community by a Faculty Member.
Greene’s teaching centers on United States religious history, particularly American religions as they relate to politics, wealth and poverty, race and ethnicity, the environment, and the modern rural South. She also directs the Master of Theological Studies Program.
Bruna Digiacomo Cerveira, fourth-year doctoral candidate in Latin American history, received the 2026 Beveridge Family Research Grant in Western Hemisphere History from the American Historical Association. The grant will support research for her dissertation project, “Liberated African Children Between Empires: Slavery, Freedom, and British Imperialism in Rio de Janeiro, 1831–1888.” Cerveira is among just eleven graduate students in history nationwide to receive the AHA’s Beveridge grant this cycle. Her dissertation is advised by Drs. Mariana P. Candido and Thomas D. Rogers.
Jordyn Alvarez Starr received the 2026 Laney Award for Inclusive Excellence in Graduate Education. This award recognizes students who “engage in service activities that promote inclusivity in the graduate community while also helping to develop and implement strategies to remove barriers for historically marginalized groups and helping them participate fully in graduate education and their respective professions.” Starr was one of four recipients of the award this year.
Starr is a graduate student in Latin American and Caribbean History with research interests centered on struggles against slavery and imperialism in the Spanish Caribbean, especially Puerto Rico. Starr’s dissertation project, titled “Revolutionary Rhetoric: Antislavery and Anticolonial Alliances in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico,” is advised by Drs. Adriana Chira and Yanna Yannakakis.
Alejandro Guardado, a 2026 graduate of the Latin American History doctoral program, has won the Gustavo Gutiérrez Research Award from Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism. Guardado’s project is titled “Reimagining Community: Indigenous Organizing in Mexico’s Neoliberal Turn, 1968–2000.”
Inaugurated in 2025, Gustavo Gutiérrez Research Awards honor the life and legacy of Rev. Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P., the Peruvian priest and theologian widely seen as the father of Latin American liberation theology. The award supports projects in theology, history, and the social sciences that engage or take inspiration from Gutiérrez’s work on the preferential option for the poor.
The Undergraduate Committee is pleased to announce the recipients of the Emory History Department’s undergraduate senior prizes for the 2025-26 academic year. These awards were presented at our annual Senior Celebration on Tuesday, April 28, from 1:00-3:00 pm, in the Brooks Commons.
Congratulations to the following awardees for their outstanding work in history:
The African, Asian, and Latin American History Prize for best record in African, Asian, and Latin American History
🙞 Lucia Alexeyev 🙜
James Z. Rabun Prize for the best record in American History
🙞 Kennedie Black 🙜
George P. Cuttino Prize for the best record in European History
🙞 Edmund Cayley 🙜
James Z. Rabun Prize for the best record in American History
Congratulations to History Department alum Dr. Diego Javier Luis on receiving the American Historical Association’s Jerry Bentley Prize in World History for his first book,The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History (Harvard University Press, 2024). This is the fourth prize for Luis’s work, following the 2024 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard UP, the 2025 Howard F. Cline Prize in Mexican History from the Latin American Studies Association, and the 2025 Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions Book Prize.
Luis’s acclaimed work offers “The definitive account of transpacific Asian movement through the Spanish empire—from Manila to Acapulco and beyond—and its implications for the history of race and colonization in the Americas.” In his review in the Hispanic American Historical Review, Rubén Carillo Martín describes the book as “a brilliant exercise of global microhistory and essential reading for anyone hoping to get a full picture of colonial Spanish America, Asian diaspora studies, or protoglobalization.”
Luis is Rohrbaugh Family Assistant Professor at The Johns Hopkins University. He graduated from Emory in 2014 with a double major in History with highest honors and English and Creative Writing, before pursuing his PhD at Brown University.
The African-American Intellectual History Society has named the finalists for its annual Pauli Murray Book Prize, and Dr. Danielle Wiggins (PhD, ’18) was short-listed for her newly-published monograph Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). Named for pioneering lawyer, scholar, activist, and theorist Pauli Murray, the prize recognizes the best book concerning Black intellectual history published in the preceding year.
Described as a “provocative new history of modern black liberalism,” Black Excellence has already received notable praise. For instance, George Derek Musgrove, co-author of Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital, writes: “Beautifully written and wonderfully insightful, Black Excellence is a must read for anyone who wants to understand both the liberatory and disciplinary history of black liberalism in the post–civil rights era.”
Wiggins is Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown University. She completed under doctoral work under the advisement of Dr. Joe Crespino, Jimmy Carter Professor of History and Interim Dean of Emory College of Arts & Sciences.
Read the abstract of Black Excellence below, and learn more about the other nominees for the 2026 Murray prize.
Black Excellence offers a provocative new history of modern black liberalism by situating the seemingly conservative tendencies of black elected officials in the post–civil rights era within neoliberal American politics and an enduring black liberal tradition.
In the 1970s and ’80s, cities across the country elected black mayors for the first time. Just as these officials gained political power, however, their cities felt the full brunt of white flight and deindustrialization. Tasked with governing cities in crisis, black political leaders responded in seemingly conservative ways to the social problems that austerity worsened. Nowhere was this response more evident than in Atlanta. In the nation’s preeminent black urban regime, black leaders such as mayors Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young employed the power of policing and the private sector to discipline black Atlantans, hoping they would equip vulnerable communities with the tools to manage the volatility of the era.
Danielle Wiggins shows that these punitive responses to the problems of crime, family instability, and unemployment were informed by black liberalism’s disciplinary impulse: an enduring tendency to reform behaviors believed to threaten black survival in a white supremacist nation. Forged in response to the violence of Jim Crow, the disciplinary impulse relied upon notions of pathology and its inverse, black excellence. Wiggins identifies several black liberal efforts to cultivate excellent black communities, families, and workers in the post–civil rights era, including community policing, corporate-sponsored family initiatives, and black entrepreneurship.
In embracing disciplinary strategies, however, black liberals often focused on behavior at the expense of addressing structural inequality. Consequently, their approaches dovetailed with those of the “New” Democrats, whose post–Great Society social policies were informed by urban black liberals. Black Excellence reveals thus how urban black liberals not only reshaped black politics but, as Democrats, also helped build the neoliberal Democratic Party.
Each year Emory’s 40 Under Forty program features a group of innovative alumni creating positive change throughout the world. The 2025 cohort includes two former history majors doing remarkable work in business, law, and academia: Jeremy Evans (09C) and Matthew Kim (10C, 10G).
Read profiles of Evans and Kim published by the Emory 40 Under Forty program below, and browse all the members of this year’s outstanding cohort.
Jeremy Evans 09C is a partner in the Financial Restructuring Group at Paul Hastings LLP, where he advises some of the world’s largest asset managers and hedge funds. He structures complex financing transactions and restructurings across industries and asset classes, approaching challenging situations with creativity and strategic insight to achieve successful outcomes for his clients. Evans studied history and religion and was deeply engaged in campus life.
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A student-athlete, he was a four-year member and three-year captain of the Men’s Golf Team, served on the Varsity Athletic Committee, and was recognized as a Georgia Collegiate Athletic Association All-America Scholar Athlete and University Athletic Association All-Academic honoree. He went on to earn a law degree, graduating magna cum laude from the University of Miami School of Law.
Jeremy has been recognized as a New York Metro Super Lawyers Rising Star, named to the Best Lawyers Ones to Watch list, and honored with the Turnarounds and Workouts “Outstanding Young Restructuring Lawyers” award in 2024.
His time at Emory instilled in him the discipline, perspective, and drive that continue to guide his professional and personal success.
Matthew Kim (10C 10G) is an assistant professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, where he combines his passions for research, teaching, and public service to shape the development of the law. His scholarship, which focuses on criminal law and civil procedure, has appeared in leading law reviews, including The Ohio State Law Journal, Florida Law Review, and Texas A&M Law Review.
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His academic journey began at Emory College, where he majored in international studies and history, building a strong foundation that informed his graduate and professional studies in law, international relations, political science, and statistics.
Through his teaching and research, Kim continues to explore complex legal questions while mentoring a new generation of lawyers and scholars.
Emory Magazine has published a feature of Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black’s most recent book, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War. The book won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History and the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and was a finalist for the James Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians. COMBEE offers the first detailed account of the dramatic campaign to free nearly 800 enslaved people led by Harriet Tubman on the Combahee River in South Carolina in 1863. Fields-Black is herself a descendant of one of the participants in the raid.
Fields-Black received her undergraduate degree in history and English from Emory and her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She is Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University.
The History Department annually awards its Clio Prizes to the best paper in a Freshman History Seminar and the best research paper in a junior or senior History Colloquium. This year, we are pleased to recognize outstanding work by Emma Rose Ceklosky and William Wainwright.
Ceklosky received the prize for the best paper written in a freshman seminar for her work, “From Exotic Blossoms to Budding Women in Science.” Ceklosky completed this paper in Dr. Judith Miller`s spring 2025 freshman seminar “The World of Jane Austen.” About the course, she writes: “I loved the stories I discovered about horticulture and how it empowered 19th-century women. Dr. Miller’s class brought history to life for me. I recommend her to everyone and am honored that she nominated me for this prize.” Ceklosky plans to double-major in English and Creative Writing and Psychology.
Spring 2025 graduate William Wainwright received the prize for the best research paper written in a history junior/senior colloquium for his work “Recentering the Black Sea,” which he completed in Dr. Michelle Armstrong-Partida`s course “Europe: Merchants-Pirates and the Slave Trade.” Wainwright graduated summa cum laude with a BA in International Relations (highest honors) and History in the spring 2025. Reflecting on the prize and his experience as a major, he writes: “Thank you so much for this. I am honored and grateful to receive this prize. The Emory history department, and Dr. Armstrong-Partida’s class in particular, have been hugely important for my academic development. I look forward to continuing to stay in touch with the professors and staff who have made it possible. Thank you again.”
