Recent Emory graduate and history major Alex Minovici has been selected as the inaugural recipient of the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry’s Undergraduate Honors Award for the thesis, “Singe Spaima: The 1989 Revolution and the Politics of Violence in Socialist and Post Socialist Romania.” Minovici, who completed a double major in Philosophy, Politics, and Law, produced the thesis as an Undergraduate Honors Fellow at the Fox Center over the 2025-26 academic year. “Singe Spaima” received Highest Honors from the Emory Department of History.
Minovici offered reflections on the thesis and experience as a fellow at the Fox Center in conversation with Karl-Mary Akre (Fox Center Communications and Outreach Coordinator). Read an excerpt below along with their full conversation.
“…what truly gives Romanian people power in their new democracy is remembering the violence and trauma with the express purpose of holding state officials accountable; refusing to forget abuses. Memory can be an act of resistance. Along these lines, I feel as if my thesis is part of a broader effort to document, remember, and respect the trauma that Romanians experienced in recent history.”
Jessica Alvarez Starr, a first-year PhD student, will be serving as an intern with the Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration (PRAC) Summer 2025 Graduate Student Internship Program. As part of this 8-week program, Jessica will gain valuable exposure to collections in the Archivo General de Puerto Rico (AGPR) and the University of Puerto Rico’s Colección Puertorriqueña (CPR). Jessica will work alongside archivists to aid in organizing, transcribing, and digitizing efforts for the AGPR while developing their own research project on enslavement and emancipation practices in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. As an intern, Jessica will receive a stipend to cover travel and living costs for their work in San Juan. They are grateful for the opportunity to conduct archival research, gain preservation skills, and develop connections with scholars to advance their studies. Read more information about the PRAC internship. Their dissertation, tentatively titled “Revolutionary Rhetoric: Antislavery and Anticolonial Alliances in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico,” is advised by Drs. Adriana Chira and Yanna Yannakakis.
Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black (BA, ’92) has received the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War(Oxford UP, 2024). The committee for the prestigious award lauded Combee as a “richly-textured and revelatory account of a slave rebellion that brought 756 enslaved people to freedom in a single day, weaving military strategy and family history with the transition from bondage to freedom.” Combee also won the 2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, given annually to a work that enhances the general public’s understanding of Abraham Lincoln, the American Civil War soldier, or the American Civil War era. The Pulitzer Prize in History was shared this year with Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, by Kathleen DuVal (UNC).
Fields-Black received a BA from Emory College in 1992 and is now Professor and Director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University. Read an excerpt from an interview with Fields-Black below and a feature article about the award: “Carnegie Mellon Professor Wins 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History.”
“In 2025, it is hard for Americans to fathom Harriet Tubman’s courage and selflessness, going back into what I call the “Prison House of Bondage” so many times to rescue family, friends and members of her community on the Maryland Eastern shore when she could have led a relatively comfortable life as a free woman in Philadelphia, St. Catherines, Canada or Auburn, New York. Then, during the Civil War, she risked her freedom and her life to go down to Beaufort, South Carolina, and rescue enslaved people she did not know, and (as she told to her biographers) whose dialect and culture she could not understand. Risking her freedom and her life so that other enslaved people could be free was a supreme act of bravery.“
On April 30 the History Department will gather for the annual Senior Celebration to honor history major, joint major, and minor graduates. Five graduating students will receive senior prizes for their exceptional contributions to undergraduate historical inquiry at Emory. The senior prize recipients are:
James Z. Rabun Prize for the Best Record in American History – Matthea Boon
Named for former professor James Z. Rabun, this prize is awarded annually to the graduating senior history major or joint major in Emory College who has achieved the best overall record in American history courses.
The African, Asian, and Latin American History Prize for Best Record in African, Asian, and Latin American History – Rebecca Casel
Established in 2015, this award is given annually to the graduating senior history major or joint major in Emory College who has achieved the best overall record in African, Asian, and Latin American history courses.
George P. Cuttino Prize for the best record in European History – Ezekiel Jones (Co-recipient)
Established in 1984 to honor Professor George P. Cuttino, this prize is awarded annually to the graduating senior history major or joint major in Emory College who has achieved the most outstanding record in European history courses.
The Matthew A. Carter Citizen-Scholar Award – Alex Minovici
Established in memory of Matt Carter, who graduated from Emory in May 2000 with High Honors in History, this award is given each year to the graduating history major or joint major in Emory College who exemplifies the qualities that made Matt Carter such an outstanding individual: high academic achievement and good works in the community.
George P. Cuttino Prize for the best record in European History – Samantha Stevens (Co-recipient)
Established in 1984 to honor Professor George P. Cuttino, this prize is awarded annually to the graduating senior history major or joint major in Emory College who has achieved the most outstanding record in European history courses.
Congratulations to third-year History graduate student Gerardo Manrique de Lara Ruiz on receiving the 2025 Graduate Student Prize from the Institute of African Studies (IAS) at Emory. This prize is presented biennially to a graduate student who has made significant contributions to the IAS, including consistent and meaningful participation in the IAS seminar and a notable impact on the academic life of the Institute. Manrique de Lara Ruiz’s research interests include colonial rule, deliberative politics, sovereignty, and customary law in 20th-century Southern Africa (Botswana and Lesotho). Drs. Clifton Crais and Mariana P. Candido serve as Manrique de Lara Ruiz’s advisors.
Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black (BA, ’92), Professor and Director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University, has received the 2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize for her book COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War(Oxford UP, 2024). COMBEE offers the fullest account to date of Tubman’s Civil War service, including her role in the momentous 1863 raid that led to the freeing of nearly 800 people. The Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, which includes an award of $50,000, is given annually to a work that enhances the general public’s understanding of Abraham Lincoln, the American Civil War soldier, or the American Civil War era.
Fields-Black received her undergraduate degree in history and English from Emory and her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research specializations include the transnational history of West African rice farmers, peasant farmers in pre-colonial Upper Guinea Coast and enslaved laborers on rice plantations in the antebellum South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry. Indiana UP published her first book, Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora, in 2014. She has also produced compelling work about that past that transcends disciplinary boundaries. She served as executive producer and librettist of “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice,” a contemporary classical and multimedia symphonic work and the first symphonic work about slavery on rice plantations.
Read a quote from Dr. Fields-Black about receiving the prize below and find the press release from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History here.
“I am thrilled to receive this award and honored to be the vehicle through which the story of Harriet Tubman’s Civil War service and the Combahee River Raid are told. I came to the history of the Combahee River Raid through my many years of work on rice-growing technology, rice fields, and rice laborers (free and enslaved) on both sides of the Atlantic and my passion for uncovering new sources and methods, which reveal the voices of Africans and people of African descent who did not author written sources. I aspired to tell the history of the Combahee River Raid from the perspectives of the people who participated in it, Harriet Tubman, the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers, and the Combahee freedom seekers who liberated themselves in the raid. This was no small feat since they were all formerly enslaved and the overwhelming majority were illiterate.“
Four Emory History Department majors have been named to the Emory 100 Senior Honorary, an award program that recognizes exceptional student leaders in the graduating class. Majors Emilyn Hazelbrook, Klaire Mason, Alexander Moss, and Adelaide Rosene joined the honorees this year. Members of this prestigious group, which is marking its 20th year in 2025, are campus leaders, thought provokers, dynamic athletes, academic mentors, and community influencers. They have made meaningful contributions at Emory and are working to create a lasting impact in communities worldwide. Members of 100 Senior Honorary come from Oxford College, Emory College, Goizueta Business School, and the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. Past honorees continue to shape Emory’s future by mentoring students, supporting admissions, leading alumni chapters, organizing reunions, and serving on leadership boards. Read more about this program here.
Dr. Crystal R. Sanders, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently published A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs with UNC Press. The book chronicles the little-known history of “segregation scholarships,” a pre–Brown v. Board of Education practice wherein southern states paid to send Black students out of state for graduate education instead of creating separate but equal graduate programs at tax-supported Black colleges or by admitting Black students to historically white institutions. A finalist for the 2025 Association for the Study of African American Life and History Book Prize, A Forgotten Migration was also the focus of a recent piece in Forbes. Read an excerpt from that piece, in which Sanders explains the genesis of the project, along with the full article: “A History Of ‘Segregation Scholarships’ And The Impact On HBCUs.”
“Growing up in rural North Carolina, I noticed that many of the retired Black public school teachers in my church had master’s degrees from NYU and Columbia University’s Teachers College. Quick math let me know that they had earned these degrees in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I asked my father why these women had chosen to go so far away for graduate school and he answered my question with a question: ‘Did they really have a choice?’” Sanders elaborated, “My dad’s comments stayed with me and I began exploring the credentials of Black public school teachers in the decades before desegregation and realized that Black teachers all over the South seemed to have these degrees from northeastern and midwest institutions.”
Dr. Sharon T. Strocchia, Professor of History, has been selected as the recipient of this year’s Society for Italian Historical Studies Senior Scholar Citation. The award recognizes Strocchia’s “profound contributions to the study of Italian history – as a researcher, teacher, and mentor – and the esteem of her peers, colleagues, and students in the field.” Strocchia has authored or edited multiple books, including Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (Harvard UP, 2019), which won prizes from the Society for Italian Historical Studies, the Renaissance Society of America, and the History of Science Society.
First-year graduate student Becca De Los Santos has been awarded the American Historical Association’s Raymond J. Cunningham Prize, given annually for the best article published in a journal and written by an undergraduate student. She published the prize-winning article, “Inversion of the Top-Down Operation: Enslaved Voices and French Abolitionism in 1840s Senegal,” in the Spring 2024 edition of Herodotus while in her senior year at Stanford University. Her related undergraduate honors work also received accolades. Titled “‘Poor Souls’ and ‘Dangerous Vagabonds’: The Enslaved Pursuit of Liberation in Post-Abolition Senegal, 1848-1865,” her thesis received the Josephine Baker Undergraduate Honors Thesis Prize and the Robert M. Golden Medal for Excellence in the Humanities and Creative Arts at Stanford.
As a first-year doctoral student, Becca is interested in slavery, abolition, and emancipatory trajectories in the nineteenth-century French Empire. In particular, she seeks to examine how individuals negotiated their livelihoods after emancipation through laws and customs. Her geographic areas of interest include Senegal, Réunion, French Guiana, and Guadeloupe. Her faculty advisers are Mariana P. Candido, Adriana Chira, and Clifton Crais.
