Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, was awarded honorable mention from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Brazil Section for his latest book, Living and Dying in São Paulo: Immigrants, Health, and the Built Environment in Brazil(Duke University Press, 2025). The award category is Best Book in the Humanities, or the Antonio Candido Prize.
In his review of Lesser’s work in the Hispanic American Historical Review, Gilberto Hochman (Oswaldo Cruz Foundation) writes: “Through meticulous and multidisciplinary research, Lesser establishes a dialogue with the growing Brazilian historiography on the city, health, and epidemics, adding new questions and answers from the countless layers that are established over time in an urban space.”
Dr. Daniel LaChance, Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow in Law and the Humanities and Associate Professor, has received a Distinguished Achievement Award from his alma mater, Carleton College. LaChance was one of just three people in his graduating class of 2001 to receive the award, which “recognizes exceptional achievement and impact within the field or fields of professional accomplishment, non-professional pursuit, or volunteer service.” Read the award citation below:
Daniel LaChance ’01 is a leading scholar, teacher, and public intellectual in the field of American legal studies whose work has been widely recognized for its originality, impact, and interdisciplinary reach. After studying English at Carleton, he earned his PhD in American studies from the University of Minnesota, where his dissertation received the Best Dissertation Award in the Arts & Humanities. During his graduate studies, he was recognized for his exceptional promise, winning national awards such as the Graduate Student Paper Prize from the Law & Society Association and securing prestigious William Stout and Thomas Wallace Fellowships. LaChance’s career is marked by significant scholarly achievements, including the publication of his highly acclaimed first book, Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States (2016), which earned the Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award. He also co-authored Crimesploitation: Crime, Punishment, and Pleasure on Reality Television (2022), a pioneering study that bridges the gap between legal history and popular culture. Currently associate professor of history at Emory University, he has been honored with the John Emory Award for Teaching and Advising and appointed as a Winship Distinguished Research Professor. His commitment to public engagement is further demonstrated by his frequent contributions to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Newsweek. LaChance is a beloved teacher, honored for his mentorship and dedication to students and his deep commitment to public service, evidenced by his teaching in Georgia prisons. Shaped by his Carleton education, he exemplifies intellectual excellence, humility, and a profound commitment to justice.
The History Department celebrates Senior Graduate Program Administrator Katie Wilson on completing twenty years of service to Emory University. Katie has been instrumental to the success of our graduate students and the graduate program as a whole. This milestone was recognized at the Emory College of Arts & Sciences Staff Service Awards Ceremony and at a gathering of History Department faculty and staff colleagues. Thank you, Katie, for your exceptional work.
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.
