History graduate student Katrina Knight recently presented at the University of Maryland’s 16th annual Graduate History Conference. Delivered on a panel with the theme “Histories of Subaltern Revolt,” Knight’s paper was titled “Rebellion, Reformation, or Romanization? The Barbarian Reges and the ‘End’ of the Western Roman Empire.” The focus of the conference this year was “Conflict, Protest, Insurrection, Coup.” Knight’s research centers on the ways in which Roman cultural identity intersected with provincial identity during and after the Roman Empire. Her dissertation is titled “Becoming UnRoman: Romans and Romanness in Late Antique and Early Medieval Britain and Italy, AD 400-700.”
Category / Events
Six History Honors Students Present at Fox Center’s Undergraduate Honors Colloquium
Six History Honors students will present at the upcoming Undergraduate Honors Colloquium, convened by the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. The History majors featured and the titles of their talks are:
- Scott Benigno: “Depicting Zulu: Race, Empire, and Zulu Representations in the British Metropole, 1820s-1910”
- Bronwen Boyd: “Ceci n’est pas une signare: Locating Women in Nineteenth-Century Urban Coastal Senegal: Using French Representations of the Signares”
- Hannah Charak: “Terror from the Top Down: Violence and Voter Suppression in the Postwar South”
- Willie Lieberman: “The Mystery of England’s First Great Opera: Nahum Tate, Dido, and Womanhood”
- Julien Nathan: “Who is the Nation: Democratization of Leftist Media in West Berlin”
- Matthew Takavarasha: “Apostates of the Rechtsstaat: Jurisprudence between Weimar Democracy and Nazi
Dictatorship”
The event will take place on Wednesday, April 6th, 2022, from 4-6pm EST in Ackerman Hall on the 3rd floor of the Carlos Museum.
Anastasiia Strakhova to Present at Tam Institute Symposium
Graduate student Anastasiia Strakhova will present on her research at the upcoming Brickman-Levin Symposium, organized by the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and Laney Graduate School. Strakhova’s talk is titled “Selective Emigration: Border Control and the Jewish Escape in Late Imperial Russia, 1881-1914.” The symposium will take place via Zoom on Wednesday, April 6, at 7pm.
Update – Find a recording of the event here: “The Brickman-Levin Symposium.”
Camille Goldmon to Present at Southern Historical Association’s Junior Scholars Workshop
Doctoral candidate Camille Goldmon will present a paper as part of the Southern Historical Association’s Junior Scholars Workshop (via Zoom) on March 17, 2022, from 4-5pm. Goldmon’s paper is titled “Shades of Radicalism: The History of Radical Agrarian Organizations in Alabama.” Connie Lester (UCF) and R. Douglas Hurt (Purdue) will offer brief commentary.
Emory Historians Celebrated in ‘Feast of Words’
Each year the Emory Center for Faculty Development and Excellence, Emory Libraries, and the Emory Barnes and Noble Bookstore host the “Feast of Words,” an event celebrating Emory faculty who have written or edited books in the prior year. This year’s edition, which took place via Zoom, featured multiple works published by History Department faculty, associated faculty, and an alumnus between September 2020 and August 2021. Find a list of those faculty below, along with their publications, and watch the full virtual celebration here.
Anderson, Carol (African American Studies). The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. Bloomsbury.
Andrade, Antonio (History). The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China. Princeton UP.
Dudziak, Mary (Law) and Mark Philip Bradley, eds. Making the Forever War: Marilyn Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism. U of Massachusetts P.
Guidotti-Hernandez, Nicole (English). Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora. Duke UP.
Lal, Ruby (Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies). Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan. Penguin Random House, India.
Pardo, Rafael (Law), Paul Barron, and Mark Wessman. Secured Transactions: Problems and Materials. West Academic.
Perry, Craig (Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies and Jewish Studies), David Eltis (History, emeritus), Stanley Engerman, and David Richardson, eds. The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500 – AD 1420. Cambridge UP.
“Visions of Slavery,” Co-Organized by Walter C. Rucker, Awarded Prestigious Mellon Foundation Grant
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Emory College a $225,000 grant for a year-long investigation of the histories of unfreedom in the Black Atlantic. The grant will support a symposium titled “Visions of Slavery,” which is co-organized by Dr. Walter C. Rucker, Professor of History, and Bayo Holsey, Associate Professor of Anthropology. The event will take place as a part of Mellon’s 2022-2023 Sawyer Seminar series and involve faculty from other university campuses across Atlanta. History Department faculty Mariana Candido and Adriana Chira are part of the working group for the seminar. Read more about the symposium via the Emory News Center as well as the Department of African American Studies.
History Dept. Co-Sponsors Rothschild Memorial Lecture Featuring Dahlia Lithwick
The History Department is a co-sponsor of the 13th annual Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild Memorial Lecture, scheduled for Nov. 11 and featuring lawyer, writer, and journalist Dahlia Lithwick. A Supreme Court expert and senior editor at Slate, Lithwick is also Senior Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Kogod Research Center and Lecturer at the University of Virginia School of Law, where she recently taught a course on the legacy of Justice Ginsburg. As a leading commentator on law, politics, and the Supreme Court, her work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and Commentary.
Lithwick will speak on the legacy of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and will also give a faculty/graduate student seminar on the approach of the current Supreme Court to church-state issues. The program will explore the life and jurisprudence of Justice Ginsburg through a Jewish lens, including how her religious upbringing and immigrant background shaped her constitutional worldview and philosophy of what America could and should be. Find more information about the event, including registration, here.
The event is sponsored by Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and co-sponsored by Emory University’s Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Center for Ethics, Center for Women, Departments of German Studies, History, Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, and Religion, Office of Spiritual and Religious Life, and School of Law.
Anderson to Present at the Decatur Book Festival on October 2
Dr. Carol Anderson will present at the upcoming Decatur Book Festival on October 2, 2021. Anderson will discuss her most recent work, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021). The festival this year has been scaled back to a one-day, virtual event. Find out more information about the festival itself here along with more about participating Emory faculty via this Emory News Center piece: “Decatur Book Festival becomes one-day October event, features Emory authors.”
Suddler Named OAH Distinguished Lecturer
Dr. Carl Suddler, Assistant Professor of History, has been named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians. The OAH’s Distinguished Lectureship Program is a speakers bureau comprised of nearly 600 historians dedicated to sharing American history. Read the OAH’s biography of Suddler below, and find out more about the other 22 scholars selected for this year’s cohort.
Carl Suddler is an assistant professor of history at Emory University. His publications, teaching, and public scholarship have placed him among a small number of African American scholars who study the intersections of Black life, crime, and sports since the late nineteenth century. Suddler’s first book, Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York (2019) is widely used in college and graduate classrooms across the country. He joined historians of the American carceral state who have produced a burgeoning wave of literature on criminalization, law enforcement, and imprisonment in America from the eras of slavery and settler colonialism to the modern age of mass incarceration and global counterinsurgency. In addition to his monograph, Suddler has published works that have appeared in the Journal of American History, Journal of African American History, American Studies Journal, Journal of Sports History; in 2020, he edited a special issue of The American Historian magazine that historically contextualized the global protests that occurred in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others; and in 2021, Suddler worked with Harvard University’s Global Sports Initiative to help professional athletes become more informed on how to maximize their platforms to contribute to social justice efforts across the globe. With his recent op-eds and articles in outlets such as the Washington Post, Bleacher Report, HuffPost, and Brookings Institute, Suddler has built a name for himself outside of the academy. His expertise is in high demand from scholarly communities and media outlets such as CNN, ABC News, Al Jazeera, Black News Channel, and NPR.
Rucker, Anderson, and Goldmon Help to Organize ‘In the Wake of Slavery and Dispossession’ Symposium
This fall Emory University will host a symposium titled, “In the Wake of Slavery and Dispossession: Emory, Racism and the Journey Toward Restorative Justice.” Dr. Walter C. Rucker, Professor of African American Studies and History, Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and Associated Faculty in History, and History doctoral student Camille Goldmon have served on the symposium’s steering committee. The Emory News Center recently published a feature story on the Sept. 21-Oct. 1 event, which will be free to the public. Read an excerpt from their story quoting Dr. Rucker below along with the full article: “Fall symposium connects activism to Emory’s history of slavery and land dispossession.”
“‘The past is a part of our living present,’ says Walter Rucker, an African American studies and history professor and steering committee member. ‘Slavery, dispossession and Jim Crow created a continuum for the racial logics we live with today. To talk about slavery and how it devalued Black lives helps us address why a police officer could kneel on a man’s neck for nine minutes. The same, or similar, logics that spawned racism energize patriarchy, homophobia and transphobia as well. Every person has a role in chipping away at these constructs in order to create a more just future.'”