Dr. Carol Anderson, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies and associated faculty in the History Department, recently sat for an interview on the “Big Books and Bold Ideas” show from Minnesota Public Radio. Anderson was interviewed alongside Lindsay M. Chervinsky, a presidential historian and the Executive Director of the George Washington Presidential Library. Speaking in the lead up to the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20, Anderson and Chervinsky draw parallels to earlier periods in U.S. history and offer commentary on the country’s political trajectory. Anderson is the author of many books, including, most recently, The Second:Race and Guns in a Fatally-Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021). Listen to the MPR conversation here: “On the brink of the inauguration, historians reflect on America’s trajectory.”
Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt will return to the Emory faculty as University Distinguished Professor following her service as the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism in the Biden administration. A renowned historian of modern antisemitism and the Holocaust, Lipstadt will retain her positions as Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies in the Department of Religion and Associated Faculty in the History Department. She is only the fourth person to hold a University Distinguished Professor chair, following Jimmy Carter, Salman Rushdie, and Kevin Young. Read more about Lipstadt’s return in the Emory News Center’s article.
“I am excited to bring what I have learned during my time with the State Department back to Emory to help teach the next generation of scholars and leaders,” Lipstadt says. “When my nomination was announced, I said that the one thing I would miss was being in the classroom with my Emory students. Now, I look forward to returning to campus to resume the crucial task of supporting students as they learn to evaluate evidence and think critically.”
Faculty and graduate students in the Emory History Department will teach a rich slate of undergraduate courses in the spring 2025 semester. These include offerings at the 200 and 300 levels, as well as many compelling interdisciplinary courses cross-listed with departments across campus. Browse the offerings below.
200-Level Courses
HIST 215/AMST 285-1: History of the American West, Patrick Allitt, TTh 11:30am-12:45pm
HIST 221/AFS 221-1: The Making of Modern Africa, Clifton C. Crais, TTh 10am-11:15am
HIST 228/AMST 228/ EAS 228 1: Asian American History, Chris Suh, MW 2:30pm-3:45pm
HIST 239/AAS 239: History of African Americans Since 1865, Kali Gross, MW 10am-11:15am
HIST 247: Napoleon’s Europe, Brian Vick, MW 5:30pm-6:45pm
HIST 254/MESAS 254: From Pearls to Petroleum, Roxani Margariti, MW 10am-11:15am
HIST 265/MESAS 235: Making of Modern South Asia, Hugo Hansen, MW 4pm-5:15pm
HIST 267W/AAS 267W: The Civil Rights Movement, Carol Anderson and Lizette London, MW 4pm-5:15pm
Members of Joe Crespino’s “Carter Presidency” seminar course visiting Jimmy Carter’s Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, in 2018.
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter died on December 29, 2024, at the age of 100. Dr. Joseph Crespino, Senior Associate Dean of Faculty and Divisional Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Jimmy Carter Professor of History, has helped to shape of popular understandings of Carter’s life and legacy, including in the days since his passing. Carter nurtured a “unique collaboration” with Emory University, which included regular end-of-term visits to Crespino’s “Carter Presidency” seminar course. Crespino was named the first Jimmy Carter Professor in 2014. View a presentation Crespino recently gave about Carter’s legacy, along with a list of recent articles from, and media citations of, Crespino focused on the former president.
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. Daniel LaChance, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow in Law and the Humanities and Associate Professor of History, was quoted in a mid-December 2024 U.S. News & World Report article about whether President Biden would seek to commute the sentences of remaining prisoners on federal death row. A week after that article, the Biden administration announced that 37 of those 40 prisoners would have their sentences reclassified to life without parole.
“He’s very much made the death penalty a symbol of what he represents,” Daniel LaChance, an associate professor at Emory University who wrote the book “Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States,” says of Trump.
“It’s pretty shrewd on his part because we know that support for the death penalty is concentrated amongst white Protestant Republicans – a key and core part of his base,” LaChance says.
Overall, about 53% of Americans support the death penalty for someone convicted of murder, according to polling from Gallup. Support for the death penalty for a convicted murderer has been trending down in recent decades after reaching a historic high of 80% in 1994, according to Gallup.
Graduate student Amelia Golcheski co-authored an article just published in a special edition of The American Historical Review focused on the theme of resilience. In their article, Golcheski and co-author Jessie Ramey (Chatham Univ.) use the career of activist Kipp Dawson to examine how resilience can operate in social movements even as they encounter setbacks, losses, and violent repression. Golcheski and Ramey’s multimedia, open education website, “Kipp Dawson: The Struggle Is the Victory,” develops the idea of “radical collaboration” and focuses on movement networks, interconnections, and affects. Their contribution includes an introduction to Dawson’s work and a video on the making of the site. The Kipp Dawson site was produced by the Emory University Center for Digital Scholarship, co-directed by Dr. Allen E. Tullos. Read the AHR piece, titled “Love, Hope, and Joy,” and view an interview with Dawson from their site below.
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.
Dr. Chris Suh, Associate Professor of History, was recently interviewed about Asian-American voting patterns and political affiliation in the lead up to the November election. Suh was quoted in the article “What a trip to Georgia’s ‘Seoul of the South’ says about the Asian American vote,” centered Asian-American voters in Gwinnett County in Northeast Atlanta. Asian-American voter turnout was 84% higher in Georgia in the 2020 elections compared with 2016, drawing increased national attention to voting patterns among this demographic group, in particular, in 2024. Suh weighs in on these dynamics, including how the COVID-19 pandemic and surge of related anti-Asian hate contributed to turnout and party affiliation, in this article as well as a separate NBC News video segment, “Breaking down key issues motivating Asian American voters this election cycle.” Emory student Jin Namgoong was also quoted in the “Seoul of the South” piece. Read the full NBC news article here, along with an excerpt quoting Suh:
Asian Americans in Gwinnett lean more Republican than the racial group does nationally and align more with voters regionally, said Chris Suh, an associate history professor at Emory University in Atlanta. Many are also newer immigrants, so specific ethnicity — Korean or Vietnamese, for example — is more of an identity than simply being Asian American. And because of that, they require long-term investment, and their votes are still up for grabs, experts say.
Dr. Joseph Crespino was recently quoted in the Voice of America article, “At 100, former President Jimmy Carter’s legacy reevaluated,” which reappraises Carter’s presidency following his 100th birthday in early October 2024. An expert in the political and cultural history of the twentieth-century United States, Crespino is among multiple historians who contest conventional narratives of Carter’s presidential administration – as opposed to his much-celebrated post-presidency – as an unequivocal failure. Crespino developed this analysis, in part, through conversations with the former president, who would regularly visit campus to engage with students in Crepino’s courses in Bowden Hall.
Crespino is Senior Associate Dean of Faculty and Divisional Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences and the inaugural Jimmy Carter Professor of History. Read an excerpt of the VOA piece below along with the full article.
“Putting human rights front and center in American foreign policy — no president had done that in the way that Jimmy Carter had,” Crespino told VOA during a recent interview at his office on campus at Emory University. “It was important in shifting the balance of power in the Cold War, but it was also an important moment in the aftermath of the Vietnam War to reassert once again America’s moral responsibilities in the world.”
