Congratulations to Dr. Ruby Lal, Professor of South Asian Studies and affiliated faculty in the History Department. Lal’s recent monograph, Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan (W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), has been named a finalist in the History category for the 2018 L.A. Times Book Prize. Read more about Lal’s book here.
Congratulations to Eric Goldstein for his recent book On Middle Ground: A History of the Jews of Baltimore (Johns Hopkins Press, 2018), which was named a finalist for the American Jewish Studies Book Award of the Jewish Book Council. On Middle Ground was co-authored with Deborah R. Weiner. Goldstein is the Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and Associate Professor of History and Jewish studies.
Dr. Carol Anderson’s newly-released book, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy, was named to the National Book Award longlist. Published by Bloomsbury and released on September 11, 2018, One Person, No Vote charts continuities in practices of voter suppression from the nineteenth century through the present. Read more about Anderson’s work and Emory’s representation on the National Book Award longlist in the Emory News Center’s article “Emory professors named to 2018 National Book Awards longlists.”
Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies, has just published a new book, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (Bloomsbury Publishing 2018). Anderson is Associated Faculty in the Department of History. The Emory News Center profiled Anderson’s new work in a video and article by Kimber Williams: “New book explores history of voter suppression in America.” Anderson is also the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, which received the 2016 National Book Critics Award in Criticism.
Congratulations to Assistant Professor of History Dawn Peterson for being named the 54th Annual Georgia Author of the Year in the category of History/Biography. Peterson received the prize for her monograph Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion (Harvard University Press, 2017). The award committee offered the following appraisal of Peterson’s work:
Indians in the Family is an important and compelling history that explores the adoption of Native American youth by whites during the period of antebellum expansion, unveiling how Natives, and the whites who ultimately sought to displace them, used adoption to achieve divergent agendas. Peterson’s eloquent account draws upon archival records to piece together the various motives that inspired this phenomenon. Indians in the Family’s readers will find stories about whites who adopted Native children, and Native families and communities—stories that uniquely illuminate how “family,” nation-building, race-making, slavery, resistance, and expansion, factor in this this little-known chapter in America’s history. In the end, Peterson concludes, “For U.S. whites, the politics of adoption in post-Revolutionary North America was a family story that sought to mask the violence of U.S. territorial expansion, Indian dispossession, and African American servitude” while “For Native people, the placement of children within white homes was a way to support indigenous families and maintain indigenous sovereignty.”
Read about other Georgia Author of the Year award winners here. Also check out a recent interview Peterson gave for the History Department website.
Congratulations to graduate student Kyungtaek Kwon for winning the best graduate paper award from the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies. Kwon’s paper is titled, “The Boundary of Komsomol’tsy between Heroes and Vydvizhentsy in the Soviet Far Eastern City Komsomol’sk-na-Amure in the 1930s.” Associate Professor of History Matthew J. Payne is Kwon’s advisor.
Congratulations to History Honors student Beatrix Conti, who was recently awarded a Halle Institute – Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry Global Research Fellowship for conducting research during the Summer of 2018. Conti is an English and History double major, and her project is entitled The Sassoon Family: Jewish Engagement with British Imperialism and the Opium Trade. View the full list of fellows here.
Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies has awarded a research and travel grant to History Honors student Liza Gellerman. The grant will support Gellerman’s research during the Summer of 2018. Gellerman also won an Undergraduate Humanities Honors Fellowship for the fall of 2018 from the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Congratulations!
Congratulations to Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies, for winning a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship in constitutional studies. In 2016 Anderson published the New York Times bestseller White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury). Her next book, One Person, No Vote, is slated for publication this September. Read more about Dr. Anderson and the fellowship here.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship a $300,000 grant to support the updating and expansion of Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. Robert W. Woodruff Emeritus Professor of History David Elits and Professor of History Allen E. Tullos are co-directors of the project. The funding will specifically fund the development of “People of the Atlantic Slave Trade” (PAST), a new feature of the database and website focused on the biographies of historical figures linked to the slave trade. Read more about the grant at the Emory News Center.