Category / Awards

by abritt

‘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.

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‘On Middle Ground,’ Co-Authored by Dr. Eric L. Goldstein, Wins Book Prize


The Southern Jewish Historical Association recently awarded the quadrennial book prize to On Middle Ground: A History of the Jews of Baltimore (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018), co-authored by Emory Associate Professor Eric L. Goldstein. Goldstein’s co-author is Deborah R. Weiner. On Middle Ground argues that Baltimore stands out among large U.S. cities in that it is neither fully northern nor fully southern, and that the Jews of Baltimore have shared in this “middle” position. The prize committee noted that the authors “consistently ask the question of how Baltimore differed from comparable communities while still reflecting the broad social and economic patterns with which scholars of American Jewish history are familiar.” Read another committee member comment below and order a copy of the book here.

“[One] committee member wrote that On Middle Ground ‘can stand alone as a history of an important American city as well as a history of Jews who settled there.’ That the authors also manage to accomplish this feat in a manner that has the potential for appeal to a wide readership makes On Middle Ground a volume truly deserving of the SJHS book prize.”

by abritt

Graduate Student Stephanie Bryan Presents Paper and Wins Commendation at Oxford Symposium

Graduate student Stephanie N. Bryan presented her paper “Under the Cover of Savory Vapors: Opossums, Power, and Jim Crow Politics” at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. The paper addresses the custom of hunting and cooking opossums in the southern USA and its manipulation by early 20th century politicians. The paper subsequently won a commendation by the Sophie Coe Prize committee. The judges praised the paper as “a surprising piece of culinary history” and considered it “well researched and well told.” Read the full judge’s report here. Bryan’s advisers in the History Department are Allen Tullos and Patrick Allitt.

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Dr. Stefanie M. Woodard (PhD ’19) Wins Essay Prize from NC German Studies Seminar and Workshop Series

Congratulations to Dr. Stefanie M. Woodard (PhD ’19). Her article manuscript “Ethnic German ‘Resettlers’ from Poland and their Integration into Western Germany, 1970-1990” won the inaugural Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize for Advanced Graduate Students in Central European History from the North Carolina German Studies Seminar and Workshop Series (NCGS). The jury selected Dr. Woodard’s work because it “married archival rigor and theoretical sophistication.” Read more about the prize here.

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Claudia Kreklau (PhD ’18) Wins Parker-Schmitt Dissertation Award from the Southern Historical Association

Congratulations for Dr. Claudia Kreklau for winning the Parker-Schmitt Dissertation Award from the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association. Kreklau completed her dissertation, entitled “‘Eat as the King Eats’: Making the Middle Class through Food, Foodways, and Food Discourses in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” in 2018. The dissertation was advised by Drs. Brian Vick, Sander Gilman, and Dawn Peterson. Kreklau is currently Associate Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. 

 

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Crespino and Lal Win Georgia Author of the Year Awards

Atticus Finch

Two History Department faculty have won 2019 Georgia Author of the Year awards. Dr. Joseph Crespino, Chair and Jimmy Carter Professor of History, won in the history category for his Atticus Finch: The Biography (Basic Books). The publisher describes Atticus Finch as charting

how Harper Lee’s father provided the central inspiration for each of her books. A lawyer and newspaperman, A. C. Lee was a principled opponent of mob rule, yet he was also a racial paternalist. Harper Lee created the Atticus of Watchman out of the ambivalence she felt toward white southerners like him. But when a militant segregationist movement arose that mocked his values, she revised the character in To Kill a Mockingbird to defend her father and to remind the South of its best traditions. A story of family and literature amid the upheavals of the twentieth century, Atticus Finch is essential to understanding Harper Lee, her novels, and her times.

Associated Faculty in History Ruby Lal, whose primary appointment is as Professor of South Asian Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, received the Author of the Year award in the biography category. Lal’s Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan chronicles the life of a seventeenth-century empress who “wielded unprecedented power, strategizing with senior counselors, minting currency, addressing the public, shooting tigers, and designing clothing and architecture.” The book was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

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Deborah E. Lipstadt, Associated Faculty in History, Receives Cuttino Award for Distinguished Mentoring

Congratulations to Professor Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, for receiving the George P. Cuttino Award for Distinguished Mentoring. The award is named in honor of the late George Peddy Cuttino, a member of Emory’s History Department from 1952 to 1984. Read more about Lipstadt’s distinguished record as a mentor and scholar here: “Cuttino Award honors historian Deborah Lipstadt for mentoring excellence.”

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Lena Oak Suk (PhD, ’14) and Andrew G. Britt (PhD, ’18) Receive Prizes from the Latin American Studies Association

The Brazil section of the Latin American Studies Association recently awarded prizes to Dr. Lena Oak Suk and Dr. Andrew G. Britt, both historians of Brazil and alumni of the Emory History Department. Suk, who was advised by Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History Jeffrey Lesser, is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. She received Honorable Mention in the Best Article in the Humanities category her piece: “‘Only the Fragile Sex Admitted’: The Women’s Restaurant in 1920s São Paulo, Brazil,” Journal of Social History 51:3 (Spring 2018). Britt, who is currently Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at Northwestern University, received Honorable Mention in the Best Dissertation in the Humanities category for his work, “‘I’ll Samba Someplace Else’: Constructing Neighborhood and Identity in São Paulo, 1930s-1980s.” Britt was co-advised by Lesser and Thomas D. Rogers, Associate Professor of Modern Latin American History and NEH/Arthur Blank Distinguished Teaching Professor (2018-2021).

Natália Salgado Bueno, Assistant Professor in Emory’s Department of Political Science, also received an Honorable Mention in the Best Article in the Social Sciences category for:  “Bypassing the Enemy: Distributive Politics, Credit Claiming, and Nonstate Organizations in Brazil,” Comparative Political Studies 51:3 (Mar. 2018), pp. 304–340.