Category / Events

by abritt

Webster to Present at “Oceans Disconnect” International Workshop in Munich

Poster for Oceans Disconnect Workshop

Graduate student Anjuli Webster will present at an upcoming workshop in Munich, Germany, titled “Oceans Disconnect.” The conference has been convened by David Armitage (Harvard), Sujit Sivasundaram (Cambridge), and Roland Wenzlhuemer (LMU Munich). Webster will present a paper titled, “Liquid stasis: How European empires used the ocean to enclose Maputo Bay.” Webster’s dissertation, advised by Drs. Clifton Crais, Mariana P. Candido, Yanna Yannakakis, and Thomas D. Rogers, is titled “Fluid Empires: Histories of Environment and Sovereignty in southern Africa, 1750-1900.”

by abritt

Anderson Speaks at 10th Annual Athens Democracy Forum

International premier of Dr. Carol Anderson’s film I, Too.

Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently participated in the Athens Democracy Forum in the Greek capital. The event – now in its tenth year – is convened by the Democracy & Culture Foundation in association with The New York Times. Anderson screen her film I, Too at the forum (marking the film’s international premier) and discussed how voter suppression tactics in the U.S., particularly those that limit the right of American-Americans to vote, are threatening American democracy. Read an excerpt from the New York Times’s coverage of the event below, along with the full article here: “TikTok, Fake News and Obstacles to the Ballot Box.”

Carol Anderson — a professor of African American studies at Emory University in Georgia and the maker of a documentary titled “I, Too,” which was screened in Athens — kicked off the debate with an urgent entreaty for voter registration to be simplified.

One of the first things that we have to recognize, in the U.S. context, is that you have the rise of what we call voter suppression laws,” she said. “These laws were targeted at key elements in the population to ensure that they would have multiple obstacles to have to jump over” to vote.

Those groups are then blamed for not voting, when in fact, they faced, and continue to face, “obstacles that look race-neutral, but that are racially targeted. What we have to do is dismantle the barriers to voting.”

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Muscogee Nation and Indigenous Language Path Working Group Hold Events on Campus

Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery

The Muscogee Nation and the Indigenous Language Path Working Group held events for Emory students, faculty, and staff on the Atlanta and Oxford campuses this past week. Listening sessions were held on October 27 and 28 for members of the Emory community associated with the Working Group, which is co-chaired by Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery (Lumbee), Cahoon Family Professor of American History. Then, on October 28, singers, storytellers and other artists from the Muscogee Nation conducted a teach-in on the Quadrangle at the Atlanta campus. Read more about these events and the broader initiative of which they form part via the Emory News Center’s article: “Muscogee Nation members to conduct teach-in; Emory community invited to Indigenous Language Path listening sessions.”

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Smith to Deliver NIH History of Medicine Lecture on ‘Jim Crow in the Asylum’

On Thursday, September 15, Dr. Kylie M. Smith will deliver the National Institutes of Health’s James H. Cassedy Lecture in the History of Medicine. An expert in the history of race in health care and the history of psychiatry, Smith will deliver a presentation titled, “Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South.” Smith is Associate Professor and Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow for Nursing & the Humanities in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. She is also Associated Faculty in the History Department. Read coverage of the event in The Washington Post, view the talk description below, and tune in to the live video stream feed on Thursday, September 15 at 2pm.

In 1969, after a protracted legal battle, Judge Frank M. Johnson of Alabama ordered that segregation of that state’s psychiatric hospitals was illegal and unconstitutional. In his judgement, Johnson drew on government inspections and grass roots legal activism to critique the terrible conditions that prevailed for Black patients. In this lecture Dr. Smith will give a preview of her forthcoming book Jim Crow in the Asylum in which she will demonstrate that racial segregation in psychiatric hospitals in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi was supported by underlying racist ideologies and has had long term consequences for psychiatric care in the South. This research draws on extensive records from the NLM, national and state archives, and the papers of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and is supported by the G13 Grant from the National Library of Medicine.

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Alum Cameron Katz (’21) Connects Young Adults to History through ‘Made by Us’ Project

Emory History alum Cameron Katz has been busy since graduating in 2021. She has been working on a project called Made By Us, which connects 18-30 year olds with more than 150 museums and historic sites. Their biggest program is the “Civic Season,” Juneteenth – July 4th, a dedicated time to explore what you stand for through activities, events, resources, and more in order to become a more informed, engaged citizen year-round.

The FREE Kickoff Party took place at the Atlanta History Center in Midtown on Sunday, June 12, from 2-7PM. Anchoring celebrations happened all across the country at the same time.

Support for the 2022 Civic Season is generously provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Coca-Cola Company and AMERICAN HERITAGE® Chocolate.

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LaChance Co-Organizes Upcoming Conference ‘Unsettling Law’ at Emory School of Law

Dr. Daniel LaChance, Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor of History, has co-organized and will present at a conference on Emory’s campus this week. Titled “Unsettling Law,” the conference is the 24th annual gathering of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities (LCH). LaChance is currently treasurer of the organization. The Emory University School of Law will host the June 16-17 gathering, which will include mostly in-personal conversations with virtual attendance options available for some events.

LaChance will chair a panel titled “Rethinking Retribution” and present a paper – “Captain Vere’s Electric Chair: The Cultural Politics of State Killing in the Late 19th Century United States” – on a panel centered on “Affect, Attachment and Capital Punishment.” In addition to panels and in an effort to foster the next generation of scholars in law and the humanities, the LCH is holding an all-day workshop for 15 Ph.D. students on Wednesday, June 15, and partially subsidizing their travel and accommodations. Read the overview of the conference below and find out more information here.

Law often resides in the pull between what is settled and what is not. Precedent guides us until it does not. Law’s stability is in constant conversation with its own necessary responsiveness as well as with what troubles it from outside of legal institutions. Disobediences, whether civil or not, have the power to unsettle what is taken to be settled. And forces like climate change pose challenges to settled law by destabilizing what may make obedience and order possible at all. Law continually expands the range of persons it recognizes, for better or worse, while it claims across all changes that it serves the interests of all. Borders exclude but remain permeable, and we argue about what is owed to others regardless of their citizenship status. States claim sovereignty and face refusals from other sovereignties within their borders. Even settler colonialism is a process rather than an outcome, so what is settled and what remains open to different futures may be contested. How do and should we imagine law in these unsettled times? What creative forces might we bring to bear in these moments between past and future, whether for unsettling what ought to change or stabilizing what is endangered? How might different disciplines, methodologies, arts, literatures, and technologies represent, reinforce, or resist unsettling law? We invite proposals taking up that question from a variety of humanities-oriented perspectives.

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First Year PhD Cohort Delivers Hi-Five Research Talks

The first-year cohort of the History doctoral program recently presented their research in the annual Hi-Five end-of-year gathering. The format was adapted from the Three Minute Thesis model, developed by the University of Queensland (UQ) in Australia. See the flier above for the names of the graduate students who presented and their research, and check out the images from the event below.

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Webster Selected as Dissertation Fellow for Mellon Seminar ‘Visions of Slavery’

Congratulations to graduate student Anjuli Webster on being selected as a dissertation fellow for Emory’s upcoming Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Visions of Slavery: Histories, Memories, and Mobilizations of Unfreedom in the Black Atlantic.” Funded by a $225,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation, the seminar will bring together scholars at Emory and Atlanta-area universities to examine the “manifold ways slavery in the Black Atlantic has been archived, interpreted, memorialized, mobilized, and resisted.” Webster’s nine-month fellowship will provide opportunities to participate in planning the seminar, as well as support for conducting research and presenting findings related to the seminar’s central theme. Webster’s dissertation, advised by Drs. Clifton Crais, Mariana P. Candido, and Yanna Yannakakis, is titled “Water’s Power: Ecologies of Sovereignty, Race, and Resistance in south Indianic Africa.”

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Graduate Student Jessica Markey Locklear Participates in UMBC Roundtable

Doctoral student Jessica Markey Locklear recently participated in a conversation hosted by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Albin O. Kuhn Library. Titled “Indigenous Community Archiving and Collective Memory,” the virtual roundtable centered on community archiving projects within American Indian communities of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Locklear was joined in the conversation by Siobhan Hagan (founding director, Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive), Tiffany Chavis (Consulting Archivist, UMBC), and Ashley Minner (Assistant Curator for History and Culture, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian). Locklear’s dissertation, advised by Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, is titled “The Other Lands We Know: Lumbee Migrations and the Maintenance of Indian Identity, 1880-1980.”

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Graduate Student Anjuli Webster Presents at “Charting African Waterscapes” Conference

History graduate student Anjuli Webster recently presented a paper at the conference “Charting African Waterscapes: A Conference on African Maritime History Across Time and Space.” Webster’s paper was titled “’Kawubheke ukuphangelana kwemifula’: isiNguni waters through Maputo Bay” and was delivered on the panel “Political Ecologies of Water.” Webster’s research uses water as a way to understand the convergence of local and global forces in south Indianic Africa in the nineteenth century. Webster’s dissertation is titled “Water’s Power: Ecologies of Sovereignty, Race, and Resistance in south Indianic Africa.”