Category / Awards

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Ashley Parcells (PhD, ’18) Receives NEH Summer Stipend

Dr. Ashley Parcells, Assistant Professor of History at Jacksonville State University, has received a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The support will allow Parcells to complete interviews and two chapters for a book on apartheid and sovereignty in KwaZulu, South Africa. Her project is titled “Ethnicity, State-Building, and the Making of Apartheid, ca. 1951 to 1994.” Parcells completed her doctorate in 2018, with Dr. Clifton Crais, Professor and Director of the Institute of African Studies, serving as her primary dissertation adviser.

 

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Four History Majors Inducted into Phi Beta Kappa

Congratulations to the four history majors inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society this spring. They are Melanie Dunn, Cameron Katz, Yaza Sarieh, and Jesse Steinman. Sarieh and Steinman are seniors; Dunn and Katz are both juniors. The Gamma Chapter of Georgia was established at Emory University on April 5th, 1929, by the authority of the Sixteenth National Council of the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa. The initiation ceremony, originally slated for the first week of April 2020, has been postponed to the fall due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Hannah Abrahamson Wins AHA’s Beveridge Research Grant

4th-year doctoral student Hannah Abrahamson was recently awarded a Beveridge Research Grant from the American Historical Association. Abrahamson is a historian of colonial Mexico writing a dissertation entitled, “Women of the Encomienda: Households and Dependents in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Yucatan, Mexico.” The Beveridge grant supports research in the history of the Western Hemisphere (the United States, Canada, and Latin America).

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Channelle Russell Receives Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship

Congratulations to Channelle Russell on winning a Mellon Mays Undergraduate fellowship. Russell is a sophomore with a joint major in History and English, concentrating in African Atlantic history and literature, with a minor in Anthropology. Her Mellon Mays research project is tentatively titled “Unspooling Venus: Intimacy, Space, and Memory in 1700s Brazil” and explores the life of 18th-century enslaved woman Xica da Silva, whose historical enslavement became a cultural monument in contemporary Brazilian media. Russell’s interest in the Atlantic stems largely from a Fall 2018 freshman seminar she took with Dr. Adriana Chira, “Radicals and Revolution in the Caribbean.” Her interest in archival work took root in Dr. Maria Montalvo’s current “North American Slave Revolts” course. Beyond being a College undergrad, Russell is interested in knowledge production and media and plans to further explore the intersections of narrative formation and history in graduate school.

Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program works to increase the number of underrepresented minority students pursuing doctoral degrees in the arts and sciences and, in doing so, to create more diverse faculties on university campuses in the United States and South Africa. Emory has had comprehensive participation in the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program for more than 17 years. Read more about the fellowship here.

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Schainker, Yates Featured Among Emory’s Robust Contingent of Fulbright Scholars

Emory University was recently named a top producer of Fulbright scholars by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Six professors and administrators were awarded Fulbright Scholar Awards in 2019-20. Those awardees include Dr. Ellie R. Schainker, Arthur Blank Family Foundation Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies. Schainker will conduct research in Israel and Lithuania for her current project, “Rites of Empire: Jewish Religious Reforms in Imperial Russia, 1850-1917.” Read our earlier story about Dr. Schainker’s project: “Schainker Wins Fulbright Global Scholarship and Fellowship at Moscow’s Jewish Museum & Tolerance Center.”

The awardees also include former academic department administrator Kelly Yates, who is now assistant director of the Halle Institute for Global Research. Yates received a Fulbright position in the U.S.-Germany International Education Administrators Program, which creates links with the societal, cultural and higher education systems of other countries.

Read about the other awardees in the last year from the Emory News Center: “Emory named a top producer of Fulbright Scholars.”

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History Majors Coe and Fuller Win 2019 Elizabeth Long Atwood Undergraduate Research Awards

Annually Emory’s Woodruff Library recognizes outstanding research among undergraduates in the Emory College with the Elizabeth Long Atwood Undergraduate Research Awards. Eligible students must use the library’s collections and research resources in their original papers, digital projects, or posters and show evidence of critical analysis in their research skills.

Congratulations to two history majors who won this award for 2019. Ellie Coe (class of 2022), is a history and Russian & East European studies double major. She won for her project, “The Soldier’s Queue in the Eighteenth Century.” Hannah Fuller (class of 2020) is a history major and was recognized for her project, “Jemima Wilkinson: The Genderless Feminist of the Enlightenment.” Both Coe and Miller completed their research under the supervision of Dr. Judith A. Miller, Associate Professor of History.

Read more about the Atwood Awards, including former history students who have won the prize, here: The Elizabeth Long Atwood Undergraduate Research Award.

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Honoring Kristin Mann: Contribute to Establishing the Mann Prize in African Studies

This year Dr. Kristin Mann retired from the Emory History Department after a long and accomplished career. The Laney Graduate School has launched a special initiative to honor Mann’s legacy. The Mann Prize in African Studies will be awarded to an outstanding graduate student whose work and commitment to African Studies embodies the career of Kristin Mann.
To name this award in honor of Dr. Mann, we must raise $12,500. If we are unable to reach this goal by December 31st, 2019, the funds will be allocated for general unnamed awards in African Studies. Please consider making a gift to honor the legacy of Dr. Kristin Mann and support African Studies graduate education in the Laney Graduate School at Emory.
Contribute to the establishment of the Mann Prize on the Emory Online Giving website. In addition, read more about Dr. Mann’s career on her Emeritus Faculty profile and in the text below, written by Clifton Crais, Professor of History and Director of the Institute of African Studies.

“After coming to Emory University in 1979, Professor Mann helped create the Institute of African Studies, which she directed from 1993 to 1996. The Institute is one of the country’s oldest and most dynamic centers of Africanist scholarship. Professor Mann was very active in creating the Women’s Studies Program, now the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Professor Mann was also instrumental in bringing to Emory University the African Studies Association (ASA), the world’s largest organization devoted to the study of Africa, and in creating the nationally-ranked Ph.D. program in African History. Between 2008 and 2011, Kristin chaired the Department of History. A model citizen, Professor Mann has been active throughout Emory University, including the President’s Committee on Undergraduate Education, the Faculty Council, and the University Senate. A dedicated mentor and a meticulous reader, Professor Mann has advised generations of students, at Emory and around the world. The Mann Prize honors her commitment to students, her collegial spirit, and her enduring contributions to African Studies.“

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‘Masquerading Politics,’ by John Thabiti Willis (PhD, 2008), Named African Studies Association Book Prize Finalist

John Thabiti Willis (PhD, 2008) published Masquerading Politics: Kinship, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Yoruba Town with Indiana University Press in 2017. Willis’ book is a finalist for the African Studies Association Book Prize, the premier award given by the association.  The book stems from Willis’ 2008 dissertation, “Masquerading Politics: Power and Transformation in a West African Kingdom.” Professor Emeritus of History Kristin Mann was Willis’s advisor.

Willis is Associate Professor of History and Director of Africana Studies at Carleton College.  Read the summary of Masquerading Politics from Indiana UP below.

“In West Africa, especially among Yoruba people, masquerades have the power to kill enemies, appoint kings, and grant fertility. John Thabiti Willis takes a close look at masquerade traditions in the Yoruba town of Otta, exploring transformations in performers, performances, and the institutional structures in which masquerade was used to reveal ongoing changes in notions of gender, kinship, and ethnic identity. As Willis focuses on performers and spectators, he reveals a history of masquerade that is rich and complex. His research offers a more nuanced understanding of performance practices in Africa and their role in forging alliances, consolidating state power, incorporating immigrants, executing criminals, and projecting individual and group power on both sides of the Afro-Atlantic world.”

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Claudia Kreklau (PhD, ’18) Wins Article Prize from Goethe Society of North America

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Congratulations to Claudia Kreklau (PhD ’18), who won the Richard Sussman Prize in the History of Science 2019 for her article “Travel, Technology, Theory: The Aesthetics of Ichthyology during the Second Scientific Revolution” (German Studies Review, 2018). The prize is awarded by the Goethe Society of North America and was announced at the German Studies Association 43rd Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon.

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Debjani Bhattacharyya (PhD, ’14) Wins Honorable Mention for Best Book from the Urban History Association

Congratulations to Dr. Debjani Bhattacharyya, Assistant Professor of History at Drexel University and a 2014 PhD, whose first book recently won an award from the Urban History Association. Bhattacharyya published Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta with Cambridge in May of 2018. The Urban History Association awarded the book honorable mention for 2017-18 Best Book in Non-North American History.  Bhattacharyya is currently a Visiting Research Scholar at Princeton University in the Department of History and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies.